Tweets, triumphs, and tensions: A machine learning approach to decoding multi-tier thematic framing of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics on social media
Published in Communication & Sport, 2024
What really drives Olympic conversation? Medals or geopolitics? Our study on the Beijing 2022 Winter Games suggests the answer is “both…and it depends who’s talking.”
Analyzing a year of Twitter/X discourse with topic modeling, we identify three intertwined frames: athletic achievement, international participation/boycotts, and broader geopolitical undercurrents. The twist is tiered influence: mega creators reliably amplify on-field moments, macro creators pivot with the news cycle, micro creators lean into geopolitics and governance debates, and nano creators, despite small followings—supply the largest share of volume and spark vibrant engagement within tight communities. In short, medals keep the lights on; politics changes the color of the room.
Why this matters: for practitioners, “audience fit” beats follower counts. If you’re a rights holder or sponsor seeking sustained goodwill, build content around human performance arcs, and let mega partners carry that signal. If your goal is issue literacy or policy dialogue, invite micro voices who translate complexity for niche publics. For scholars, the study shows how multi-tier framing sharpens our theories of agenda setting and engagement—and invites richer methods (e.g., BERTopic/LLM-assisted interpretation) to capture context and code-switching across tiers.