ABSTRACT

Research question

Audiences have adopted and integrated the consumption of mega-sports events, such as the Olympic Games, through social platforms like Twitter. It is the objective of this research to identify, ‘what’ is being said (text) and ‘how’ female athletes are presented (image) on Twitter during Rio2016 Olympic Games.

Research methods

Qualitative methodology was used to analyze the official Twitter accounts of four Spanish media accounts —two sport-specific accounts: @Marca and @MundoDeportivo, and two generalist media accounts: @ElPais_Deportes and @ABC_Deportes— which are the media with the highest number of followers/readers and the largest circulation in Spain.

Results and findings

The sample consisted of 6,856 tweets, of which 1,343 were about women posted on the Twitter to positive information (47.46%), such as the achievements of the athletes, although one third of the tweets allude to negative content that highlights the female athletes’ failures. As for the photographs analyzed, it was found that 9% of the images of female athletes still revealed a clear sexual connotation, reinforcing gender stereotypes.

Implications

The emergence of new technologies, such as Twitter, free from time and space constraints that are used to justify the low coverage of women's sport in traditional media (TV, radio, and press), do not allow the reversal of the marginal presence of female athletes in the media coverage during sports mega-events such as the Olympic Games.

中文翻译：

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Twitter上奥运会的性别视角分析

摘要

研究问题

观众通过推特等社交平台接受并整合了奥运会等大型体育赛事的消费。本研究的目的是确定 2016 年里约奥运会期间 Twitter 上女运动员所说的“内容”（文本）和“如何”呈现（图片）。

研究方法

使用定性方法分析了四个西班牙媒体帐户的官方 Twitter 帐户——两个体育专用帐户：@Marca 和 @MundoDeportivo，以及两个通用媒体帐户：@ElPais_Deportes 和 @ABC_Deportes——它们是关注者数量最多的媒体/读者，西班牙发行量最大。

结果和发现

样本包含 6,856 条推文，其中 1,343 条是关于女性的，在 Twitter 上发布积极信息（47.46%），例如运动员的成就，尽管三分之一的推文暗指强调女性运动员失败的负面内容。从照片分析来看，9%的女运动员照片仍然暴露出明显的性暗示，强化了性别刻板印象。

影响

Twitter 等新技术的出现，不受时间和空间的限制，这些限制被用来证明传统媒体（电视、广播和报刊）对女子运动的报道率较低，但并不能扭转女性的边缘地位。奥运会等大型体育赛事期间媒体报道中的运动员。