Comparative Analysis of Cross-Platform Dissemination of the Village Super League on Weibo and Twitter

Within the digital media landscape, sporting events have become important sites for emotional expression and social meaning-making, yet grassroots competitions remain underexplored in comparison with mega-events such as the Olympics. Focusing on Guizhou’s “Village Super League,” this study examines cross-platform differences in narrative framing and emotional expression across Chinese and international social media. User-generated content from Weibo and Twitter between 2023 and 2024 was analyzed using an LDA topic model combined with large language model–based sentiment analysis. The results show that Weibo discourse emphasizes local culture, tournament influence, and the integration of culture, sports, and tourism, with a strongly concentrated positive sentiment orientation. In contrast, Twitter discourse frames the event as a grassroots sports phenomenon and social model, exhibiting more diverse emotional expressions and a higher proportion of neutral and negative sentiments. These findings indicate that platform-specific institutional environments and cultural contexts significantly shape the narrative modes and affective structures of sporting event communication, contributing new empirical insights into digital affective publics and cross-cultural sports communication.