Content Diversity and Hostile Language in Messi and Ronaldo Discussions on Bilibili and Reddit

This study examined online fan discussions about football on Bilibili and Reddit, two platforms that have recommender systems that select and rank online content to expose users to information. Specifically, the online discussions about Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo were analyzed to examine issues related to diversity and bias in online information exposure. In total, 200 online posts (50 posts in each of the four groups: Bilibili-Messi, Bilibili-Ronaldo, Reddit-Messi, and Reddit-Ronaldo) and 287 comments that were linked to 97 Reddit posts were analyzed. The findings showed that there were considerable differences in the topics of online discussions between the two players on Bilibili but not on Reddit. In terms of the way online content was presented, clickbait cues were found in 33% of the online posts in the Messi group and 36% of the posts in the Ronaldo group. Post-level attack flags were found in only 3% of the posts in the Messi group and 2% of the posts in the Ronaldo group. The findings of this study identified several dimensions that future studies on exposure audits can use to examine online information exposure. However, several limitations were found, including the use of different sampling frames, lack of body text in many of the online posts, and the need to validate the coding. In addition, the content was collected from the chronological search results and community listings on the two platforms. Therefore, the findings did not provide evidence of how personalized recommendations created uneven information exposure among users. Even though this study does not examine the information exposure by recommender systems in more detail, it provides a descriptive basis for such an audit on football-related topics, view points and presentation forms.