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Basketball season kicked off last month and with it comes the return of the most enduring of fan traditions: trash talk.

Now, researchers from CU Boulder have at the rivalries and insults to better understand how sports junkies interact with each other online.听

The researchers, led by CU Boulder鈥檚 Chenhao Tan and Jason Shuo Zhang, studied several years鈥� worth of data from r/nba, Reddit鈥檚 go-to platform for discussions of all things basketball. They discovered that tossing fans of opposing basketball teams together online may not be a good way to help them get along. In fact, the more those fans interacted, the group found, the more negative their comments became.听

鈥淭hey are more likely to swear. They are more likely to use negative words and they are more likely to use what we call hate speech,鈥� said Tan, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science.

The results may not be surprising to fans of famous NBA trash talkers like Kevin Garnett or Charles Barkley. But for Tan and Zhang鈥攂oth big basketball fans themselves鈥攖he study illustrates just how important sports are to peoples鈥� lives.

鈥淧eople have strong opinions and can even become violent when facing people affiliated with opposing groups,鈥� Zhang said.听

4-letter words

He and Tan wanted to see how that might play out in a far-reaching social media platform like Reddit. As of early November, r/nba claimed 2.8听million subscribers and 30 subreddits dedicated to each of the NBA鈥檚 teams.

The researchers pulled 2.1 million posts from the site dating back to the 2017鈥�18 and 2018鈥�19 basketball seasons. They then used computer software to analyze the language patterns used in those discussions.听

The group found, for example, that mixing fans of different NBA teams together online鈥攚hat researchers call 鈥渋ntergroup contact鈥濃�攎ay lead to a backfire effect.听

Take hypothetical fans of Colorado鈥檚 own Denver Nuggets. (The study didn't actually single out fans of any particular team). Based on the group鈥檚 findings, when Nuggets fans interacted only with other fans of their favorite team, their posts might be disproportionately filled with words like 鈥渉elp鈥� or 鈥渢hank.鈥�

But if Nuggets fans spent a lot of time chatting with fans of, say, the Portland Trail Blazers, their vocabulary was likely to deteriorate. In a finding that will be no shock to sports fans, those more negative Reddit users referenced one word heavily: 鈥渞efs.鈥� 听

鈥淚ntergroup users tend to complain a lot more about refs than single-group users,鈥� Tan said.

He and Zhang also found that those more negative Nuggets fans might even use similar language later when talking to other Nuggets fans. In other words, they brought their bad attitudes with them.

鈥淲hen intergroup contact occurs, we鈥檙e seeing that some negativity can spread back to a user鈥檚 home setting and make the situation even worse,鈥� Tan said.

Healthy conversations

He is quick to point out that the study can鈥檛 ferret out cause-and-effect. Do settings like r/nba make people more pugnacious, or are people who choose to interact with opposing fan groups in an online forum just more emotionally invested in the game?

Still, the researchers say that the findings are important to keep in mind as debates over toxic discourse on the internet continue. They may also provide new insights into another arena famous for social media skirmishes: politics.

鈥淚n order to bring people of different ideologies together, social media companies have proposed that maybe we can push some opposing viewpoints to peoples鈥� timelines,鈥� Zhang said. 鈥淏ut we argue that you need to be very careful in taking such a strategy online.鈥�

鈥淚 think that studies like ours can help in pointing the direction toward how we can create healthier platforms for people to have these kinds of conversations,鈥� Tan said. 鈥淚 remain optimistic that it is possible.鈥�

The researchers will report their findings Nov. 12 at the in Austin, Texas.