Characterizing Collective Attention in YouTube Live Chats of Brazilian Football Rivalries

  • Lucas Emanuel Cota Carneiro UFOP
  • Josemar Alves Caetano UFOP

Resumo


Online live chats have become an important space for collective participation during live sports broadcasts, enabling large audiences to react synchronously to unfolding events. Despite growing interest in collective attention in online systems, relatively little is known about how attention evolves during live sports discussions and how different attention levels are reflected in audience language. In this paper, we investigate collective attention dynamics in YouTube live chats associated with three major Brazilian football rivalries: Atlético Mineiro versus Cruzeiro (Super Clássico Mineiro), Corinthians versus Palmeiras (Derby Paulista), and Flamengo versus Fluminense (Fla–Flu). We model each match as a temporal sequence of relative attention levels derived from minutelevel message activity and analyze both their temporal dynamics and linguistic characteristics. First, we characterize collective attention through attention-level distributions, transition probabilities, the duration of peak-attention episodes, and their relationship with salient match events. Second, we investigate the linguistic and emotional patterns associated with different attention levels. Our results reveal that all rivalries share a common attention structure in which most match minutes are concentrated in low- and moderateattention levels, while peaks are comparatively rare. The rivalries differ mainly in how strongly goals drive the chat toward peak attention, whereas apparent differences in how long peak-attention episodes last are largely explained by volume. Across all rivalries, high-attention levels share a distinctive linguistic profile marked by informal language, emotional expression, and markers of anxiety, anger, and profanity. These findings suggest that rivalries diverge mainly in how peak collective attention is triggered rather than in their baseline distributions, even as the linguistic signature of intense attention remains largely shared. Beyond contributing to the understanding of user behavior during football matches, this work offers a methodology for analyzing collective attention in other contexts, including political debates, breaking news coverage, and other live-streamed events.

Palavras-chave: Collective Attention, Live Chat, YouTube, Football, Stream

Referências

Andrea Auconi, Lorenzo Federico, Gianni Riotta, and Guido Caldarelli. 2024. Fluctuations and extreme events in the public attention on Italian legislative elections. Scientific Reports 14, 1 (01 Oct 2024), 22804. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-69354-y

Christian Bauckhage and Kristian Kersting. 2016. Collective Attention on the Web. Foundations and Trends® in Web Science 5, 1-2 (2016), 1–136. DOI: 10.1561/1800000024

Jörg R. Bergmann and Anssi Peräkylä. 2023. The social organization of (in- )attention. Routledge, 299–322. DOI: 10.4324/9781003094111-15

Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). 2023. Between 2010 and 2022, Brazilian Population Grows 6.5%, Reaches 203.1 Million. [link]. IBGE News Agency. Accessed: June 24, 2026.

Josemar Caetano, HumbertoMarques-Neto, and Virgílio Almeida. 2026. Modeling and Analyzing Collective Attention in Online Chats. Trans. Soc. Comput. (July 2026). Just Accepted. DOI: 10.1145/3833212

Josemar Alves Caetano, Jussara Almeida, Marcos Gonçalves, Wagner Meira, Humberto T. Marques-Neto, and Virgílio Almeida. 2022. Analyzing Topic Attention in Online Small Groups. In Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (Virtual Event, Netherlands) (ASONAM ’21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 64–68. DOI: 10.1145/3487351.3488357

Josemar Alves Caetano, Gabriel Magno, Marcos Gonçalves, Jussara Almeida, Humberto T. Marques-Neto, and Virgílio Almeida. 2019. Characterizing Attention Cascades inWhatsApp Groups. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science (Boston, Massachusetts, USA) (WebSci ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 27–36. DOI: 10.1145/3292522.3326018

Josemar Alves Caetano, Humberto Torres Marques-Neto, and Virgilio Almeida. 2025. Characterizing Collective Attention on Online Chats: A Three-Pronged Approach. InWeb Information Systems Engineering –WISE 2024, Mahmoud Barhamgi, Hua Wang, and Xin Wang (Eds.). Springer Nature Singapore, Singapore, 56–66.

Jie Cai, Sagnik Chowdhury, Hongyang Zhou, and Donghee Yvette Wohn. 2023. Hate Raids on Twitch: Understanding Real-TimeHuman-Bot Coordinated Attacks in Live Streaming Communities. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 7, CSCW2, Article 342 (Oct. 2023), 28 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3610191

Cristian Candia, C. Jara-Figueroa, Carlos Rodriguez-Sickert, Albert-László Barabási, and César A. Hidalgo. 2019. The universal decay of collective memory and attention. Nature Human Behaviour 3, 1 (01 Jan 2019), 82–91. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0474-5

Flavio Carvalho, Rafael Guimarães Rodrigues, Gabriel Santos, Pedro Cruz, Lilian Ferrari, and Gustavo Paiva Guedes. 2019. Evaluating the Brazilian Portuguese version of the 2015 LIWC Lexicon with sentiment analysis in social networks. In Proceedings of the Brazilian Workshop on Social Network Analysis and Mining (BraSNAM). SBC, Belém, Brazil, 24–34.

Salvatore Citraro, Giovanni Mauro, and Emanuele Ferragina. 2024. Burstiness in Emotions: A Case Study on Collective Affective Responses in Italian Soccer Fandoms. In International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining. Springer, 56–69.

Salvatore Citraro, Giovanni Mauro, and Emanuele Ferragina. 2026. Temporal dynamics of emotions in Italian online soccer fandoms. EPJ Data Science (2026).

Manlio De Domenico and Eduardo G. Altmann. 2020. Unraveling the Origin of Social Bursts in Collective Attention. Scientific Reports 10, 1 (13 Mar 2020), 4629. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-61523-z

Lukas Dreier and Johanna Pirker. 2023. Toxicity in twitch live stream chats: Towards understanding the impact of gender, size of community and game genre. In 2023 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG). IEEE, 1–4.

Globo Esporte. 2026. Agenda de Jogos de Futebol. Retrieved from Globo Esporte [link]. Accessed on June 27, 2026.

Globo Esporte. 2026. Copa do Mundo FIFA 2026: tempo real, lances e resultados. Retrieved from Globo Esporte [link]. Accessed on June 27, 2026.

Paulo Ferreira, Genildo Gomes, Tayana Conte, and Bruno Gadelha. 2023. A live bombou? Avaliando métricas para engajamento em live streaming. In Anais do XVIII Simpósio Brasileiro de Sistemas Colaborativos (Rio de Janeiro/RJ). SBC, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil, 72–85. DOI: 10.5753/sbsc.2023.229085

Kiran Garimella, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Aristides Gionis, and Michael Mathioudakis. 2017. The Effect of Collective Attention on Controversial Debates on Social Media. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on Web Science Conference (Troy, New York, USA) (WebSci ’17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 43–52. DOI: 10.1145/3091478.3091486

Kenia Gonçalves, Flávio Soriano, Renato Vimieiro, Humberto Marques-Neto, and Jussara Almeida. 2025. Caracterização das Recomendações de Streams na Twitch para o Público Infantil e Adolescente no Brasil e nos Estados Unidos. In Proceedings of the 31st Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web (Rio de Janeiro/RJ). SBC, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil, 131–140. DOI: 10.5753/webmedia.2025.16053

Catherine Han, Joseph Seering, Deepak Kumar, Jeffrey T Hancock, and Zakir Durumeric. 2023. Hate raids on Twitch: Echoes of the past, new modalities, and implications for platform governance. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 7, CSCW1 (2023), 1–28.

Xingsheng He and Yu-Ru Lin. 2017. Measuring and monitoring collective attention during shocking events. EPJ Data Science 6, 1 (22 Nov 2017), 30. DOI: 10.1140/epjds/s13688-017-0126-4

Mark Hill. 2025. Catching Stray Balls: Football, fandom, and the impact on digital discourse. In Proceedings of the The 9th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH). 192–205.

Taizan Hokuto. 2019. pytchat: A Python Library for Fetching YouTube Live Chat. [link]. Accessed: 2026.

Yukun Jiang, Xinyue Shen, RuiWen, Zeyang Sha, Junjie Chu, Yugeng Liu, Michael Backes, and Yang Zhang. 2024. Games and beyond: analyzing the bullet chats of esports livestreaming. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Vol. 18. 761–773.

Gabriela Birnfeld Kurtz, Stefano de P Carraro, Carlos Roberto G Teixeira, Leonardo D Bandeira, Bernardo L Muller, Roberto Tietzmann, Milene Selbach Silveira, and Isabel H Manssour. 2025. StreamVis: An Analysis Platform for YouTube Live Chat Audience Interaction, Trends and Controversial Topics.. In ICEIS (2). 630–640.

Zijian Lew, Joseph B Walther, Augustine Pang, and Wonsun Shin. 2018. Interactivity in Online Chat: Conversational Contingency and Response Latency in Computer-mediated Communication. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 23, 4 (06 2018), 201–221. arXiv: [link] DOI: 10.1093/jcmc/zmy009

João Lobo, Daniel Barbosa, and Philipe Melo. 2025. Investigando a Dinâmica da Propagação do Ódio em Cascatas de Toxicidade nos Chats Ao Vivo da Twitch. In Proceedings of the 31st Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web (Rio de Janeiro/RJ). SBC, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil, 321–329. DOI: 10.5753/webmedia.2025.15110

Andre Lopes. 2026. Mesmo com delay, CazéTV bate recorde mundial de audiência no YouTube no jogo do Brasil. Retrieved from Exame [link]. Accessed on June 20, 2026.

Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, BjarkeMørchMønsted, Philipp Høvel, and Sune Lehmann. 2019. Accelerating dynamics of collective attention. Nature Communications 10, 1 (15 Apr 2019), 1759. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-09311-w

Mufan Luo, Tiffany W. Hsu, Joon Sung Park, and Jeffrey T. Hancock. 2020. Emotional Amplification During Live-Streaming: Evidence from Comments During and After News Events. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4, CSCW1, Article 47 (may 2020), 19 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3392853

S. Lydersen, V. Pradhan, P. Senchaudhuri, and P. Laake. 2007. Choice of test for association in small sample unordered r × c tables. Statistics in Medicine 26, 23 (Feb. 2007), 4328–4343. DOI: 10.1002/sim.2839

Kate Mannell. 2020. Plural and Porous: Reconceptualizing the Boundaries of Mobile Messaging Group Chats. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 25, 4 (July 2020), 274–290. DOI: 10.1093/jcmc/zmaa007

Muhammad Zeeshan Mazhar, Tolga Buz, and Yiran Su. 2025. Are Online Sports Fan Communities Becoming More Offensive? A Quantitative Review of Topics, Trends, and Toxicity of r/PremierLeague. arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.27003 (2025).

Delia Mocanu, Luca Rossi, Qian Zhang, Marton Karsai, andWalter Quattrociocchi. 2015. Collective attention in the age of (mis)information. Computers in Human Behavior 51 (2015), 1198–1204. Computing for Human Learning, Behaviour and Collaboration in the Social and Mobile Networks Era. DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2015.01.024

Jihyung Moon, Dong-Ho Lee, Hyundong Cho, Woojeong Jin, Chan Park, Minwoo Kim, Jonathan May, Jay Pujara, and Sungjoon Park. 2023. Analyzing norm violations in live-stream chat. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 852–868.

Helen Paffard and Diogo Pacheco. 2025. Kicking Politics: How Football Fan Communities Became Arenas for Political Influence. In International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications. Springer, 182–194.

María J. Palazzi, Albert Solé-Ribalta, Violeta Calleja-Solanas, Sandro Meloni, Carlos A. Plata, Samir Suweis, and Javier Borge-Holthoefer. 2021. An ecological approach to structural flexibility in online communication systems. Nature Communications 12, 1 (29 Mar 2021), 1941. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22184-2

Karine Pires and Gwendal Simon. 2015. YouTube live and Twitch: a tour of user-generated live streaming systems. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys ’15). ACM. DOI: 10.1145/2713168.2713195

Xiaoyan Qiu, Diego F. M. Oliveira, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Alessandro Flammini, and Filippo Menczer. 2017. Limited individual attention and online virality of low-quality information. Nature Human Behaviour 1, 7 (26 Jun 2017), 0132. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-017-0132

Redação. 2024. Quais são os principais clássicos brasileiros? Veja lista. Retrieved from Globo Esporte [link]. Accessed on June 27, 2026.

Mohammad Hammas Saeed, Kostantinos Papadamou, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, and Gianluca Stringhini. 2024. TUBERAIDER: Attributing coordinated hate attacks on YouTube videos to their source communities. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Vol. 18. 1354–1366.

Kazutoshi Sasahara, Yoshito Hirata, Masashi Toyoda, Masaru Kitsuregawa, and Kazuyuki Aihara. 2013. Quantifying Collective Attention from Tweet Stream. PLOS ONE 8, 4 (04 2013), 1–10. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0061823

Garriy Shteynberg. 2018. A collective perspective: shared attention and the mind. Current Opinion in Psychology 23 (Oct. 2018), 93–97. DOI: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.12.007

Tiago Ventura, Kevin Munger, Katherine McCabe, and Keng-Chi Chang. 2021. Connective Effervescence and Streaming Chat During Political Debates. Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media 1 (Apr. 2021), 1. DOI: 10.51685/jqd.2021.001

Joseph B. Walther. 2017. The Merger of Mass and Interpersonal Communication via New Media: Integrating Metaconstructs. Human Communication Research 43, 4 (June 2017), 559–572. DOI: 10.1111/hcre.12122

Yucheng Wang and Zhicong Lu. 2023. Making sense of post-match fan behaviors in the online football communities. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–17.

Yiluo Wei, Jiahui He, and Gareth Tyson. 2025. Understanding Fanchuan in Livestreaming Platforms: A New Form of Online Antisocial Behavior. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 9, 7 (2025), 1–31.

Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman. 2007. Novelty and collective attention. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, 45 (2007), 17599–17601. arXiv: [link] DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0704916104

Siqi Wu. 2022. Measuring Collective Attention in Online Content. SIGWEB Newsl. 2022, Summer, Article 4 (jul 2022), 4 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3545196.3545200
Publicado
27/10/2026
CARNEIRO, Lucas Emanuel Cota; CAETANO, Josemar Alves. Characterizing Collective Attention in YouTube Live Chats of Brazilian Football Rivalries. In: BRAZILIAN SYMPOSIUM ON MULTIMEDIA AND THE WEB (WEBMEDIA), 32. , 2026, Lavras/MG. Anais [...]. Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação, 2026 . p. 170-179. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/webmedia.2026.30749.