Social Sensing and Individual Brands in Sports: Lessons Learned from English-Language Reactions on Twitter to Pau Gasol’s Retirement Announcement

Abstract

Pau Gasol announced his retirement on 5 October 2021. Subsequently, a number of users virtually reacted. Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms, with more than 368 million active users, generating large-scale social data. This study used data from Twitter for analyzing social sensing related to an individual brand, Pau Gasol’s retirement announcement, from a quantitative and qualitative content analysis perspective. Pau Gasol’s farewell can be considered a unique event to which many people are emotionally attached, providing a great opportunity for understanding sports virtual ecosystems. A total of 2089 tweets in the English language were recovered from Tuesday 5 October 2021 at 3:00 to Thursday 7 October 2021 at 23:59, Greenwich Mean Time +00:00 time zone. During this time, posts were observed to be mainly influential during and right after Pau Gasol’s ceremony. The tweets that created more impact were published by news sources or by sports reporters. Lastly, the themes that emerged showed that the Los Angeles Lakers and the NBA were the two most important milestones in Pau Gasol’s career. The data can be used to detect potential areas of controversy or other issues to be addressed in order to preserve the athlete’s public image. These results are considered of interest for reaching better knowledge of sport virtual environments through social sensing, supporting the idea of users acting as sensors.

Towards a Comprehensive Approach for Socialbot Detection on Twitter: Integrating Multiple Features

“…Huge amount of population around the world uses one or more online social network in which the twitter and Facebook are widely used. Twitter had a global audience of over 368 million monthly active users as of December 2022 which is expected to grow by the next decade [2]. The extensive use of twitter, has led to an increase in the utilization of robotic account as twitter bots [3], where 9 to 15 percentage active twitter account are socialbots, created for various purpose, which often perceived malicious objective [4], Spreading Fake News [5], manipulating the stock market [6], promoting terrorism [7], spreading sexually explicit material [8], and the interference in 2016 United State presidential election [9] are Socialbots, which compromise the authenticity of trends, undermine democracy, and cause harm.…”