Public Discourse on Doping Scandals in Sport: A Multi-Method Analysis of YouTube Comments in the Digital Public Sphere

This article investigates how publics interpret and debate doping scandals in sport within YouTube’s communicative environment. It draws on theories of deviant behavior, labeling, moral panic, the digital public sphere, and McLuhan’s insight that media formats shape meaning. The study conceptualizes YouTube comments as a site where narratives of fairness, responsibility, and institutional trust are constructed. The empirical material comprises 1,304 comments under three types of sport-related videos: a news report, a documentary, and an athlete interview. A multimethod design integrates automated text and sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and network analysis. The findings reveal a predominantly neutral, analytical tone and low levels of meaningful interaction despite high formal connectivity, alongside a fragmented discourse in which politicized, scandal-oriented narratives overshadow medical and technical interpretations of doping. The article’s primary contribution is theoretical: it introduces fragmented rationality, which refines public sphere theory for digital environments, and routinized deviance, which extends moral panic theory to explain discursive fatigue under continuous scandals. It also offers a methodological contribution by combining computational text analysis, network modeling, and qualitative interpretation to understand audience fragmentation on digital platforms.