Presenter(s): Giselle Andrade
Co Presenter(s): Carlos McCarter, Sierra Connolly
Faculty Mentor(s): Dave Markowitz
Poster: 139
Session: Social Sciences & Humanities
A lack of political activism among African American athletes over the past two decades has drawn widespread criticism. Critics posit that the modern-era African American athletes’ accumulation of wealth has influenced the de-politicization of sports. Our study directly tests the applicability of this narrative. We used the Twitter patterns of former National Football League quarterback Colin Kaepernick, as a case study to understand the Black Lives Matter social movement. We posed the following research question: Were Kaepernick’s political tweets about #BlackLivesMatter more influential than his non-political tweets? To evaluate this question, we created a dictionary of words that contained political speech as reflected by Kaepernick’s Twitter feed. We then used the automated text analysis program, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, to count the rate of political speech in Kaepernick’s tweets that were scraped computationally in the computing environment, RStudio. Regression tests analyzed the relationship between Kaepernick’s political speech and engagements, defined as the rate of favorites and retweets per tweet. We found political speech did not affect the level of engagement of favorites (p = .65). However, the rate of political speech was related to the number of retweets per tweet (p = .056), and for each percent increase in political speech, Kaepernick’s tweets received nearly 130 fewer retweets. We believe that these data suggest retweets are a more critical degree of expression than favorites.