Still, the researchers say that the findings are important to keep in mind as debates over toxic discourse on the internet continue. Do settings like r/nba make people more pugnacious, or are people who choose to interact with opposing fan groups in an online forum just more emotionally invested in the game? He is quick to point out that the study can’t ferret out cause-and-effect. “When intergroup contact occurs, we’re seeing that some negativity can spread back to a user’s home setting and make the situation even worse,” Tan said.
In other words, they brought their bad attitudes with them. He and Zhang also found that those more negative Nuggets fans might even use similar language later when talking to other Nuggets fans. “Intergroup users tend to complain a lot more about refs than single-group users,” Tan said. In a finding that will be no shock to sports fans, those more negative Reddit users referenced one word heavily: “refs.” Based on the group’s findings, when Nuggets fans interacted only with other fans of their favorite team, their posts might be disproportionately filled with words like “help” or “thank.”īut if Nuggets fans spent a lot of time chatting with fans of, say, the Portland Trail Blazers, their vocabulary was likely to deteriorate. (The study didn't actually single out fans of any particular team). Take hypothetical fans of Colorado’s own Denver Nuggets. The group found, for example, that mixing fans of different NBA teams together online-what researchers call “intergroup contact”-may lead to a backfire effect.
Social media basketball trash talker software#
They then used computer software to analyze the language patterns used in those discussions. The researchers pulled 2.1 million posts from the site dating back to the 2017––19 basketball seasons.
As of early November, r/nba claimed 2.8 million subscribers and 30 subreddits dedicated to each of the NBA’s teams.
He and Tan wanted to see how that might play out in a far-reaching social media platform like Reddit. “People have strong opinions and can even become violent when facing people affiliated with opposing groups,” Zhang said. But for Tan and Zhang-both big basketball fans themselves-the study illustrates just how important sports are to peoples’ lives. The results may not be surprising to fans of famous NBA trash talkers like Kevin Garnett or Charles Barkley. Screenshot from Reddit's r/nba platform of fans getting into it over that perennially favorite basketball topic: the legacy of LeBron James.
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