Moral rhetoric in social media posts tied to protests becoming violent
Recent examples of movements tied to social media include the #marchforourlives effort to seek gun control, the #metoo movement against sexual assault and harassment, and #blacklivesmatter, a campaign against systematic racism that began in 2014 after the police-involved shooting death of Michael Brown, 19, in Ferguson, Missouri.
A more-violent example is the Arab Spring revolution, which began in Tunisia in late 2010 and set off protests in Egypt, Libya and toher nations, forcing changes in their leadership. In Syria, clashes escalated into a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced a multitude of refugees.
Detecting moralization online
The scientists developed a model for detecting moralized language based on a prior, deep learning framework that can reliably identify text that evokes moral concerns associated with different types of moral values and their opposites. The values, as defined by the “Moral Foundations Theory,” are focused on care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion and purity/degradation.
For this story, the researchers provided two examples of tweets containing moralized language and the moral foundations with which they are associated:
Sample Tweet 1:
Why does the opposition speak only abt black on black crime as a rebuttal to police brutality/murder? #AllCrimeMatters, right? #FreddieGray
Moral Foundations: Fairness and Loyalty
Sample Tweet 2:
regardless of how anyone feels, prayers to the police force and their family
Moral Foundations: Care and Purity
Moralization and political polarization are exacerbated by online “echo chambers” — social networks where people connect with other like-minded people while distancing themselves from those who don’t share their beliefs.
Protests, social media, and violence
Social media data help researchers illuminate real-world social dynamics and test hypotheses, explained Joe Hoover, a lead author of the paper and doctoral candidate in psychology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “However, as with all observational data, it can be difficult to establish the statistical and experimental control that is necessary for drawing reliable conclusions.”
To make up for this, the scientists conducted a series of controlled behavioral studies, each with more than 200 people. Researchers first asked participants to read a paragraph about the 2017 clashes over the removal of Confederate monuments in Charlottesville, Va. Then the researchers asked how much participants agreed or disagreed with statements about the use of violence against far-right protesters.
The more certain people were that many others in their network shared their views, the more willing they were to consider the use of violence against their perceived opponents, the scientists found.
The work was supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Defense. Other study co-authors were Marlon Mooijman of Northwestern University, Hoover from USC Dornsife and the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC, and Ying Lin and Heng Ji of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
— Read more in Marlon Mooijman et al, Moralization in social networks and the emergence of violence during protests, Nature Human Behavior (23 May 2018). (DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0353-0)
