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Applying cognitive analytic theory to understand the abuse of athletes on Twitter

Meggs, Jenny; Ahmed, Wasim

Authors

Jenny Meggs



Abstract

Purpose/rationale: Athletes and governing bodies have raised ethical concerns related to the negative psychological effects of Twitter for professional athletes. There remained a need to systematically understand the processes involved in negative fan athlete social media interactions by categorising social media data using psychological theory. This study aimed to examine the attributional (specific or global negative comments) and contextual (sport-specific and general life context or “no context”) factors of Twitter content that were Tweeted by fans about high profile sports people.Research methods: In order to retrieve preliminary social media data to explore this phenomenon, Tweet data was collected data using Twitter’s Search API related to the top 10 highest-paid athletes (a crude initial ranking of “high profile”) as ranked by Forbes, 2020 and the data was retrieved on 26 April 2020. The search and retrieval strategy used a combination of sentiment analysis and qualitative filtering in order to isolate negative tweets directed at sports athletes.Results and findings: Preliminary findings highlighted that negative tweets directed at sports athletes can be accurately classified into three broad themes: (i) global negative projections (no context) (ii) global negative projections (sport performance context), and (iii) specific negative projections (personal context). The socio ecological theory was used as a holistic model to understand the broader processes involved in fan athlete social media interaction when considering these types of negative engagement between fans and athletes.Implications: Twitter can be used as a means for the public to direct negative projections towards athletes and our study puts forward a number of applied and research recommendations for researchers and sport management staff to educate and protect athletes from the negative consequences of “twitter abuse”.

Citation

Meggs, J., & Ahmed, W. (in press). Applying cognitive analytic theory to understand the abuse of athletes on Twitter. Managing Sport and Leisure, https://doi.org/10.1080/23750472.2021.2004210

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Nov 5, 2021
Online Publication Date Nov 27, 2021
Deposit Date Nov 20, 2023
Publicly Available Date Nov 21, 2023
Journal Managing Sport and Leisure
Print ISSN 2375-0472
Electronic ISSN 2375-0480
Publisher Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/23750472.2021.2004210
Keywords Twitter; High profile sports people; Socio ecological theory; Negative projections
Public URL https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4448114

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Publisher Licence URL
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.




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