Public Shaming of Professional Athletes on Social Media

The overarching purpose of this dissertation was to explore the nature and extent of public shaming of professional athletes on social media in response to perceived legal, social, and sport-specific norm violations and the potential reasons that fans engage with athletes in this manner on social media. The methods employed were two-fold: for studies one and two, a qualitative content analysis of 7,700 fan comments on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram directed at eleven male and female professional athletes from six different sports was conducted. To analyse these data, I implemented methodological pluralism by engaging in a semantic and subsequent latent thematic content analyses. For study three, guided by a narrative methodology, I conducted five semi-structured in-depth interviews with sport fans (three males, two females) who engaged regularly with professional athletes and teams on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Findings cumulatively revealed that fans engage in public shaming of male and female professional athletes in response to the athletes’ perceived legal, social, and sport-specific violations. Public shaming on social media was evident with each athlete violation I examined, regardless of sport or experience level, and occurred across all platforms (Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram). Acts of shaming were illustrated by fans’ explicit withdrawals of support and descriptions of desired physical, psychosocial and career-related consequences for the athletes. In addition, there were undercurrents of gender and sexism observed across fans’ public shaming, which were exemplified through fans’ objectification of females, promotion of hyper-masculinity, and victim blaming. Fans proposed that public shaming acts occur in response to the threats that norm violations pose to fans’ sense of identification and belonging that have been cultivated through fandom and enhanced through the relationships perceived to be developed with athletes via social media. Specifically, fans suggested public shaming might be provoked when the integrity of fan-athlete relationships are challenged by legal, social, or sport-specific norm violations. Based on the collective findings, I explained the theoretical, methodological, and applied contributions of this dissertation to the existing literature, proposed ethical considerations for research of this nature, and discussed recommendations for future directions in this area of scholarship.Ph.D