The current study explored the thematic framing of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics on X (Twitter), examining how these thematic frames and audience engagement varied across various content creator tiers—mega, macro, micro, and nano content creators—throughout the year surrounding the event. Through the lens of the framing theory, we employed LDA topic modeling and identified three dominant thematic frames: athletic achievements and competition results, international participation dynamics including boycotts and diplomatic engagements, and geopolitical undertones reflecting on the host nation and global conflicts. A noticeable relationship between thematic frames and engagement levels was observed consistently across creator tiers, with athleticism and contest outcomes garnering sustained attention, underscoring its pivotal role in event discussions. Moreover, our findings revealed unique engagement patterns across creator tiers. Mega creators amplified reactions to sports achievements. Macro creators displayed varied engagement, suggesting responsiveness to ongoing events. Micro creators saw fluctuating engagement with a focus on geopolitical issues. Nano creators actively engaged with both sports achievements and political discussions. Overall, the study illuminates the complexities of media representations and audience perceptions, while dissecting the impactful role played by different tiers of content creators in driving public engagement with a global sporting spectacle.

Leagues increasingly feature athletes’ off-field romantic relationships on social media, yet little is known about how they shape the audience response. Our study sheds light on how textual–visual configurations depicting romantic relationships affected user engagement. Forty-one National Football League Instagram posts about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s relationship and 201,472 user comments were examined. Findings revealed that posts visually presenting Swift and Kelce with minimal romantic cues generated higher likes and more favorable sentiment than explicitly romantic content. Furthermore, we identified brand image tensions stemming from the National Football League’s simultaneous engagement of pop-culture audiences and traditional football fans, leading to polarized reactions rooted in a gendered, resource-allocation conflict. Our study illustrated how cognitive schema conflicts influenced audience responses to cross-cultural social media marketing efforts while providing practical guidance for integrating athlete romance into social media content through optimal visual–textual combinations that effectively manage competing audience expectations.

This study examined the public opinions of esports at the 2023 Asian Games and value co-creation during the event using an LLM-enhanced BERTopic modeling analysis. We identified five major themes representing public perceptions, as well as how major stakeholders co-created value within and beyond the esports ecosystem. Key findings highlighted the strategic use of social media marketing to influence public opinion and promote esports events and brands, emphasizing the importance of event logistics and infrastructure. Additionally, the study revealed the co-creation value contributed by stakeholders outside the traditional esports ecosystem, particularly in promoting national representation and performance. Our findings supported the ongoing efforts to legitimize esports as a sport, noting that mainstream recognition remains a challenge. The inclusion of esports as a medal event showcased broader acceptance and helped mitigate negative public perceptions. Moreover, contributions from non-traditional stakeholders underscored the value of cross-subcultural collaborations in esports.

Virtual sports have become an important site for shaping public value alignment through its social representation on digital platforms, particularly within social media environments. The current study examines public discourse on X(Twitter) surrounding virtual sports during the period from the 2021 olympic virtual series to the 2023 olympic esports week. Informed by framing theory, our methodology integrates computational approaches to analyze a dataset of 15,585 tweets. We employed topic modeling to identify salient thematic patterns and conducted sentiment analysis leveraging large language models to evaluate affective dimensions within public discourse. The study identifies six core thematic dimensions that characterize the social image of virtual sports. Although overall sentiment leans positive, the distribution across themes is uneven. Notably, the themes related to event-based mobilization exhibit a marked tendency toward negative sentiment. Overall, the study offers a systematic account of how the social image of virtual sports is presented in social media discourse, providing a valuable reference point for the future construction and communication of virtual sports’ public identity.