Exploring cyberbullying and cybervictimization among sports fans on Sina Weibo: the roles of personality traits and fan identity

indices), and the choice of PLS over CB-SEM is justified on predictive and distributional grounds. Fan identity showed a robust positive association with both cyberbullying and cybervictimization, providing incremental explanatory power over and above the Big Five variables. The analysis revealed that extraversion was also significantly and positively associated with cyberbullying, while agreeableness had a significant negative effect. Neuroticism was the strongest predictor of cybervictimization, followed by a positive contribution from fan identity. Conscientiousness was negatively associated with victimization, while openness to experience showed no significant effect on either outcome. Both individual differences and group-level identification contribute to online aggression and vulnerability in sports-related discourse. By extending the SIDE framework to Chinese sports fandom on Weibo, the findings highlight identity salience as a practical lever for intervention (e.g., rivalry de-escalation norms and identity re-framing) alongside personality-informed supports; design limitations (cross-sectional, self-report, nonprobability sampling) are acknowledged, and future research should incorporate behavioral trace data and probability sampling.