Social media & violenceMoral rhetoric in social media posts tied to protests becoming violent
Moral rhetoric on Twitter may signal whether a protest will turn violent. Researchers also found that people are more likely to endorse violence when they moralize the issue that they are protesting — that is, when they see it as an issue of right and wrong. That holds true when they believe that others in their social network moralize the issue, too.
Moral rhetoric on Twitter may signal whether a protest will turn violent, according to a USC-led study.
The USC researchers also found that people are more likely to endorse violence when they moralize the issue that they are protesting — that is, when they see it as an issue of right and wrong. That holds true when they believe that others in their social network moralize the issue, too.
“Extreme movements can emerge through social networks,” said the study’s corresponding author, Morteza Dehghani, a researcher at the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC. “We have seen several examples in recent years, such as the protests in Baltimore and Charlottesville, where people’s perceptions are influenced by the activity in their social networks. People identify others who share their beliefs and interpret this as consensus. In these studies, we show that this can have potentially dangerous consequences.”
USC says that the scientists analyzed 18 million tweets posted during the 2015 Baltimore protests over the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, who died as police took him to jail. Researchers used a deep neural network — an advanced machine learning technique — to detect moralized language on Twitter.
They investigated the association between moral tweets and arrest rates, a proxy for violence. This analysis showed that the number of hourly arrests made during the protests was associated with the number of moralized tweets posted in previous hours.
Tweets containing moral rhetoric nearly doubled on days when clashes among protesters and police became violent.
The study was published in Nature Human Behavior.
Social media posts as a barometer for activism
Social media sites such as Twitter have become a significant platform for activism and a source for data on human behavior, which is why scientists use them for research.
