Although the number of medals of gymnast Simone Biles is slightly lower than that of the sports world high expectations At the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, she led among American Olympians in the number of times her handle, @Simone_Biles, was mentioned on Twitter.
The Pew Research Center captured the Twitter handles of each athlete who listed a profile on the official website. US team page and examined tweets from the broader Twitter audience that directly mentioned these handles during the Games. Here are some key takeaways about how the public interacted with Team USA on Twitter.
Most social media sites allow users to interact directly with other users by tagging their handles or screen names in their posts. This analysis examines how users of a major social platform – Twitter – used the site to tag Team USA athletes during the recently concluded 2020 Olympic Games. To perform this analysis, we collected the Twitter account of each athlete listed on the official website. US team page around July 26, 2021. All athletes (including a small number of alternates) who were on the list and had a Twitter account at that time were included in the analysis.
The researchers collected all tweets posted between July 21 and August 9 mentioning any of these 438 Twitter handles using the Gnip Historical PowerTrack API, a searchable archive of all publicly available tweets. This analysis focuses on direct mentions of U.S. Olympic athletes through their Twitter accounts (such as @KDTrey5 or @Simone_Biles) and not more generic references (such as “Kevin Durant”, “KD” or “Biles”).
Read the methodology to learn more about how this analysis was conducted.
Twitter users directly mentioned US Olympians’ accounts more than 2.1 million times during the Games.
A total of 598 athletes were listed on the Team USA website at the start of the Games. And 438 of them (73% of the total) included a Twitter account in their athlete profile. From July 21 to August 9, 2021 – the Games themselves, postponed from the previous year, took place from July 23 to August 8 – more than 900,000 different Twitter accounts directly mentioned the handles of the American Olympians in more than 2 .1 million tweets. The vast majority (90%) of these athlete accounts were mentioned at least once during this period.
These mentions were mainly concentrated on a few key dates. Nearly a third (31%) of all athlete mentions occurred over the three days of July 27-29, a period that included the women’s team and individual gymnastics finals and swimmer Katie Ledecky winning the gold medal in the 1,500 meter freestyle.
Simone Biles alone accounted for 31% of all U.S. Olympic athlete mentions
One athlete in particular – gymnast Simone Biles – stood out above all others for the number of times she was mentioned by the Twitter audience. Of the more than 2.1 million tweets mentioning a U.S. Olympic athlete’s name during the Games, @Simone_Biles was referenced in more than 650,000 tweets, or 31% of the total. Biles was even more ubiquitous from July 27-29, when her handle accounted for 64% of all athlete mentions. (It should be noted that many individual tweets mentioned multiple athletes.)
Mentions of Biles included expressions of support as well as discussion of his withdrawal from competition.
Original tweets and replies mentioning Biles’ handle during the Games tended to disproportionately use certain terms and phrases compared to tweets mentioning other Olympians. Many of these terms seem to refer to Biles’ decision to drop out of contest in certain events.
Some of the most distinctive terms included supportive expressions such as “love (and) support,” “courage,” and “courageous.” Other phrases (such as “quit smoking” or “quit smoking”) referred to withdrawal in a more negative light, while others referred to issues like “mental health” and “abuse “.
These terms were up to 52 times more prevalent in tweets mentioning Biles than in tweets mentioning other athletes. However, these “distinctive” terms were relatively rare. For example, only 4% of original tweets tagging @Simone_Biles directly used the terms “stop,” “stop,” or “stop.”
Nearly 80% of athletes mention listed members of the gymnastics, basketball, and track and field teams.
Twitter handles collected from the Team USA website included athletes from 32 different sports. But just three of those sports — gymnastics, basketball and track and field — generated the vast majority of individual athlete mentions on Twitter. Athletes from these three sports accounted for 79% of all mentions of U.S. Olympic athletes during the Games, while athletes from the other 29 sports accounted for only 21% of all mentions.
The majority of tweets mentioning U.S. Olympic athletes included no original comments: 62% were direct retweets, often tweets posted by the athletes themselves. The remaining tweets included replies in which the poster included an athlete’s handle (18%), original tweets (14%), and direct replies to tweets from Team USA members’ accounts (7%) .
Other frequently mentioned athletes included Kevin Durant, Sunisa Lee
In addition to Biles, a small group of prominent athletes accounted for a significant portion of all U.S. Olympians’ endorsements during the Games. The top 10 most mentioned handles accounted for 62% of all individual athlete mentions. The most mentioned athletes generally came from the most mentioned sports, including gymnastics (Biles and Sunisa Lee), basketball (Kevin Durant, Draymond Green, Damian Lillard, A’ja Wilson and Devin Booker), and track and field ( Allyson Felix). But they also included a soccer player (Megan Rapinoe) and a swimmer (Ledecky).
The 10 most mentioned athletes included six women and four men. All four male athletes are professional NBA basketball players. But the most mentioned women come from a variety of sports: gymnastics, basketball, swimming, track and field and football.
Note: Read the methodology to learn more about how this analysis was conducted.
