ABSTRACT

Using a contentious issue in sport – the athlete protests during the playing of the national anthem – this paper examined the relationship between media outlets’ social media coverage of athlete protests and the social media user interest and sentiment. We analysed data sourced from the media outlets’ official Instagram accounts, along with comments on these posts. Using both sentiment lexicons and Random Forrest machine learning models, we derived the sentiment of 496 official Instagram posts and 137,735 user comments. We utilised logit and ordered logit regressions to examine whether media coverage of the athlete protests was responsive to user interest and user sentiment towards the issue. In addition, we employed multinomial logit regressions and two-stage least squared regressions to investigate media’s selection of topics and portrayal of the protests. We found strong evidence that both media’s decisions to cover the protests and how they cover the issue are sensitive to social media user interest and sentiment.

摘要

本文利用体育中一个有争议的问题——运动员在播放国歌时进行抗议——考察了媒体对运动员抗议的社交媒体报道与社交媒体用户的兴趣和情绪之间的关系。我们分析了来自媒体机构官方 Instagram 帐户的数据，以及对这些帖子的评论。使用情感词典和 Random Forrest 机器学习模型，我们得出了 496 条官方 Instagram 帖子和 137,735 条用户评论的情感。我们使用 logit 和有序 logit 回归来检查媒体对运动员抗议的报道是否响应了用户对该问题的兴趣和情绪。此外，我们采用多项逻辑回归和两阶段最小二乘回归来调查媒体对主题的选择和对抗议活动的描述。我们发现强有力的证据表明，媒体决定报道抗议活动以及他们报道该问题的方式对社交媒体用户的兴趣和情绪都很敏感。