Technology Category
Natural Language Processing: Discourse, Pragmatics & Argument MiningApplication Domains: Humanities & Computational Social ScienceCognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Affective Computing
Catching Stray Balls: Football, fandom, and the impact on digital discourse
🤖 AI Summary
This study investigates how emotions triggered by real-world football matches propagate across unrelated online communities—particularly on Reddit—and amplify toxic discourse. Method: Leveraging large-scale text mining of millions of posts, the authors integrate event-driven causal inference, cross-subreddit affective transfer modeling, and temporal sentiment analysis. Contribution/Results: The study provides the first empirical evidence that match outcomes induce affective contagion across structurally disconnected communities, significantly increasing negative sentiment and the frequency of rule-violating language while altering posting behavior. It introduces the “affective ecosystem” theoretical framework to elucidate the structural mechanisms underlying emotion diffusion in digital platforms. Quantitative analysis confirms a strong positive correlation between negative sentiment and toxic language. Collectively, the work advances methodological and conceptual foundations for understanding the generation and propagation of online toxicity.
Technology Category
Application Category
📝 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.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Examining emotional impact of football matches on Reddit discourse
Analyzing sentiment shifts across interconnected online communities
Understanding propagation of online toxicity triggered by real-world events
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Analyzes millions of Reddit posts computationally
Links real-world events to online sentiment shifts
Reveals cross-community emotional contagion patterns
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