How live Twitter commentaries by professional sports clubs can reveal intergroup dynamics

Social media can both decrease and increase polarization between social groups. Communicative behaviors associated with intergroup conflict are ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation. In the current paper, we propose that bias in social-media use can be assessed by focusing on live Twitter commentaries posted by sports clubs. Specifically, we focus on four bias types: biases in (1) communication volume, (2) balance, (3) fairness, and (4) recipient engagement. We analyzed Twitter commentaries placed by soccer clubs in the Dutch Eredivisie during the 2019/20 season (232 games, Ntweets = 13,789). Results on volume showed that clubs placed more tweets during wins (vs. draws or losses). For balance, we found that teams devoted a larger percentage of their feed to positive ingroup (vs. outgroup) events. For fairness, a larger proportion of positive ingroup (vs. outgroup) events were reported in the Twitter commentaries. Furthermore, fans engaged more with tweets about positive ingroup (vs. outgroup) events. By contrast, we did not find differences for negative ingroup (vs. outgroup) events for balance, fairness, or engagement. Taken together, our results show that sport clubs’ live Twitter commentaries reflect ingroup favoritism, but not outgroup derogation.