Cheating or Fair Competition? A Structuration Analysis of Social Media Responses to Lia Thomas’ NCAA Swimming Championship

Rich G. Johnson; Samer Al-khateeb; Kyran Cupido; Mohammed Madouh; Miles Romney

doi:10.1177/21674795251330304

Cheating or Fair Competition? A Structuration Analysis of Social Media Responses to Lia Thomas’ NCAA Swimming Championship

Rich G. Johnson
, Samer Al-khateeb
, Kyran Cupido
, Mohammed Madouh
, Miles Romney

Journalism and Mass Communication, Walter Cronkite School of (CRONKITE)

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

In March 2022, Lia Thomas of the University of Pennsylvania became the first openly transgender woman to win an NCAA swimming championship. Using Giddens’ structuration theory as a theoretical lens, this analysis employs Latent Dirichlet Allocation to examine how tweets about Thomas and transgender athletes contain toxic discourses based on established sports structures of fairness and sex separation of sports.

Original language	English (US)
Journal	Communication and Sport
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/21674795251330304
State	Accepted/In press - 2025

Keywords

X
social media
structuration theory
toxicity
transgender athletes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Communication
Social Sciences (miscellaneous)

Access to Document

10.1177/21674795251330304

Cite this

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abstract = "In March 2022, Lia Thomas of the University of Pennsylvania became the first openly transgender woman to win an NCAA swimming championship. Using Giddens{\textquoteright} structuration theory as a theoretical lens, this analysis employs Latent Dirichlet Allocation to examine how tweets about Thomas and transgender athletes contain toxic discourses based on established sports structures of fairness and sex separation of sports.",

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AB - In March 2022, Lia Thomas of the University of Pennsylvania became the first openly transgender woman to win an NCAA swimming championship. Using Giddens’ structuration theory as a theoretical lens, this analysis employs Latent Dirichlet Allocation to examine how tweets about Thomas and transgender athletes contain toxic discourses based on established sports structures of fairness and sex separation of sports.

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KW - structuration theory

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KW - transgender athletes

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Cheating or Fair Competition? A Structuration Analysis of Social Media Responses to Lia Thomas’ NCAA Swimming Championship

Abstract

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Access to Document

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