Cheered On or Booed Off? The Public's Reactions to Black Athlete Activism Online

• In Event: New Trends in Digital Mobilization and Protest

Abstract

The centrality of Black athletes during renewed Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and 2021 warrants a closer analysis of the ways in which sports, politics, and race interact. One prominent medium that Black athletes use to engage in political activism is Twitter. This paper uses Twitter data to analyze the public’s engagement with athletes who share political content. As others have posited, Twitter can be a convenient source of data for users’ opinions, interactions, and reported behaviors (McCormick et al. 2017). It assists in developing a broad understanding of a population’s activities and attitudes. In this paper, I analyze the Twitter feeds of prolific Black athletes that engaged in political activism between August 24 and November 7, 2020. These dates coincide with the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the subsequent strike and increased voter turnout efforts by many athletes, and the day Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ electoral victory was officially announced. Among the athletes whose Twitter feeds I plan to analyze are LeBron James, Colin Kaepernick, Maya Moore, Naomi Osaka, Bubba Wallace, and Lewis Hamilton.

Existing research that analyzes Twitter users’ engagement with celebrity endorsements of presidential candidates finds that Tweets containing endorsements of the candidates did not receive any less engagement than non-political tweets by the same celebrities (Zilinsky et al. 2019). This paper extends the existing research to specifically interrogate the ways in which Twitter users engage with a particular type of celebrity, namely Black athletes. Moreover, it further investigates the different ways in which people engage with political and non-political content on Twitter.

The analysis reveals a pattern wherein political content gets shared and commented on disproportionally more than non-political content, even though non-political content at times gets more “likes”. This is noteworthy, because retweeting and thereby sharing political content has a bigger impact on spreading the message and making the topic salient than simply liking a tweet. Moreover, higher rates of comments suggest that Twitter users tend to engage with political content more elaborately, rather than just clicking the “like” icon. The paper closes by discussing the implications for political activism in the digital age that flow from these results.

This research aims to serve not only as a baseline to show that the public pays attention to Black athlete activists, but also details how the public reacts to these athletes, thus providing a justification for new areas of research to further investigate the understudied nexus of sports, politics, and race.

Author

• Sebastian Mayer, University of Washington