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Article History

Received: 19 January 2026

Accepted: 17 September 2026

First Online: 7 October 2026

Ethics

Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

Ethics approval and consent to participate: This study used only publicly accessible social media content related to the Jiangsu City Football League (“Su Chao”), including posts, comments, video titles, and captions collected from Weibo and TikTok. The study did not involve the recruitment of participants, direct interaction with social media users, access to private accounts or messages, or the collection of biological samples or other non-public personal information. User-generated content was analyzed for academic purposes only, and the findings are reported at an aggregate level without disclosing the identities of individual users.

Human-subjects accordance statement: This study involved the secondary analysis of publicly accessible social media content and did not involve experiments, surveys, interviews, interventions, or direct interaction with human participants. The research was conducted in accordance with the ethical principles for Internet-mediated research set out in the Association of Internet Researchers’ *Internet Research: Ethical Guidelines 3.0*, particularly the principles of privacy protection, data minimization, avoidance of user re-identification, and responsible reporting. The Declaration of Helsinki was not applicable because the study did not involve medical research or direct research participation by human subjects.

Human ethics approval statement: Formal REC/IRB/ERB approval was not obtained because this study was limited to the secondary analysis of publicly accessible social media content and involved no recruitment, intervention, interaction with individuals, or access to private personal information. No institutional ethics waiver was issued for this study. On this basis, human ethics approval was considered not applicable to the present research.

Informed consent: Individual informed consent was not obtained because the study involved no direct participation, interaction, or intervention and analyzed only content that users had made publicly accessible on social media platforms. The study did not attempt to identify, contact, profile, or report individual users. No users known to be minors were intentionally targeted or separately analyzed. Accordingly, individual informed consent and guardian consent were considered not applicable rather than formally waived by an ethics committee.