Catching Stray Balls: Football, fandom, and the impact on digital discourse

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01642v2
• Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2025 09:46:57 GMT
• Title: Catching Stray Balls: Football, fandom, and the impact on digital discourse
• Authors: Mark J. Hill,
• Abstract summary: This paper examines how emotional responses to football matches influence online discourse across digital spaces on Reddit.<n>It demonstrates that real-world events trigger sentiment shifts that move across communities.<n>Negative sentiment correlates with problematic language; match outcomes directly influence sentiment and posting habits; sentiment can transfer to unrelated communities.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: This paper examines how emotional responses to football matches influence online discourse across digital spaces on Reddit. By analysing millions of posts from dozens of subreddits, it demonstrates that real-world events trigger sentiment shifts that move across communities. It shows that negative sentiment correlates with problematic language; match outcomes directly influence sentiment and posting habits; sentiment can transfer to unrelated communities; and offers insights into the content of this shifting discourse. These findings reveal how digital spaces function not as isolated environments, but as interconnected emotional ecosystems vulnerable to cross-domain contagion triggered by real-world events, contributing to our understanding of the propagation of online toxicity. While football is used as a case-study to computationally measure affective causes and movements, these patterns have implications for understanding online communities broadly.

Related papers

• Polarized Patterns of Language Toxicity and Sentiment of Debunking Posts on Social Media [5.301808480190602]
  The rise of misinformation and fake news in online political discourse poses significant challenges to democratic processes and public engagement.<n>We examined over 86 million debunking tweets and more than 4 million Reddit debunking comments to investigate the relationship between language toxicity, pessimism, and social polarization in debunking efforts.<n>We show that platform architecture affects informational complexity of user interactions, with Twitter promoting concentrated, uniform discourse and Reddit encouraging diverse, complex communication.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-01-10T08:00:58Z)
• Characterizing Online Toxicity During the 2022 Mpox Outbreak: A Computational Analysis of Topical and Network Dynamics [0.9831489366502301]
  The 2022 Mpox outbreak, initially termed "Monkeypox" but subsequently renamed to mitigate associated stigmas and societal concerns, serves as a poignant backdrop to this issue. We collected more than 1.6 million unique tweets and analyzed them from five dimensions, including context, extent, content, speaker, and intent. We identified five high-level topic categories in the toxic online discourse on Twitter, including disease (46.6%), health policy and healthcare (19.3%), homophobia (23.9%), politics. We found that retweets of toxic content were widespread, while influential users rarely engaged with or countered this toxicity through retweets.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-08-21T19:31:01Z)
• Grounding Toxicity in Real-World Events across Languages [2.5398014196797605]
  Events in the real world, like elections or conflicts, can initiate and escalate toxic behavior online. We gathered Reddit data comprising 4.5 million comments from 31 thousand posts in six different languages. We observe significant variations in toxicity, negative sentiment, and emotion expressions across different events and language communities.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-05-22T15:38:53Z)
• Echo-chambers and Idea Labs: Communication Styles on Twitter [51.13560635563004]
  This paper investigates the communication styles and structures of Twitter (X) communities within the vaccination context. By shedding light on the nuanced nature of communication within social networks, this study emphasizes the significance of understanding the diversity of perspectives within online communities.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-03-28T13:55:51Z)
• Highly engaging events reveal semantic and temporal compression in online community discourse [0.0]
  We leverage Reddit conversation data, exploiting its community-based structure, to elucidate how offline events influence online user interactions and behavior.<n>Online conversations become repetitive with a more limited vocabulary, develop at a faster pace, and feature heightened emotions.<n>Users become more active and they exchange information with a growing audience, despite using a less rich vocabulary and repetitive messages.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-06-26T14:38:07Z)
• Countering Malicious Content Moderation Evasion in Online Social Networks: Simulation and Detection of Word Camouflage [64.78260098263489]
  Twisting and camouflaging keywords are among the most used techniques to evade platform content moderation systems. This article contributes significantly to countering malicious information by developing multilingual tools to simulate and detect new methods of evasion of content.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-12-27T16:08:49Z)
• Why Do You Feel This Way? Summarizing Triggers of Emotions in Social Media Posts [61.723046082145416]
  We introduce CovidET (Emotions and their Triggers during Covid-19), a dataset of 1,900 English Reddit posts related to COVID-19. We develop strong baselines to jointly detect emotions and summarize emotion triggers. Our analyses show that CovidET presents new challenges in emotion-specific summarization, as well as multi-emotion detection in long social media posts.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-10-22T19:10:26Z)
• Affective Idiosyncratic Responses to Music [63.969810774018775]
  We develop methods to measure affective responses to music from over 403M listener comments on a Chinese social music platform. We test for musical, lyrical, contextual, demographic, and mental health effects that drive listener affective responses.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-10-17T19:57:46Z)
• Fragments of the Past: Curating Peer Support with Perpetrators of Domestic Violence [88.37416552778178]
  We report on a ten-month study where we worked with six support workers and eighteen perpetrators in the design and deployment of Fragments of the Past. We share how crafting digitally-augmented artefacts - 'fragments' - of experiences of desisting from violence can translate messages for motivation and rapport between peers. These insights provide the basis for practical considerations for future network design with challenging populations.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-07-09T22:57:43Z)
• Weak ties strengthen anger contagion in social media [12.017879121725274]
  Using the analysis of millions of tweets in Weibo, we find that anger travels easily along weaker ties than joy. This is the first time that quantitative long-term evidence has been presented that reveals a difference in the mechanism by which joy and anger are disseminated.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-05-05T02:57:51Z)
• Echo Chambers on Social Media: A comparative analysis [64.2256216637683]
  We introduce an operational definition of echo chambers and perform a massive comparative analysis on 1B pieces of contents produced by 1M users on four social media platforms. We infer the leaning of users about controversial topics and reconstruct their interaction networks by analyzing different features. We find support for the hypothesis that platforms implementing news feed algorithms like Facebook may elicit the emergence of echo-chambers.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-04-20T20:00:27Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.