Moral Foundation And Information Virality

Based on the international social media platform Twitter,this paper investigates the relationship between moral foundations and information virality of public events.It uses Moral Foundation Theory(MFT)as the main theoretical framework and the hashtag #Stop Asian Hate on Twitter as a case study.The study found that tweets applying the moral foundation of “Care/Harm”(870tweets,32%)accounted for the highest number on the topic of anti-Asian hate incidents on Twitter,followed by “Fairness/Cheating”(867 tweets,32%),“Loyalty/Betrayal”(402 tweets,15%)and “Authority/Subversion”(306 tweets,11%).The lowest number of tweets is “Sanctity/Degradation”(290 tweets,10%).Among the five groups of moral foundations,only the “Authority” and “Loyalty” dimensions emphasize the positive,while the remaining three groups are leaning towards the negative,including “Harm”,“Cheating” and “Degradation”.Tweets using "Care/Harm" moral foundation focus on the verbal and physical violence against the Asian community during the COVID-19 epidemic,and adopt moral texts to call on the public to stop discriminatory and hurtful behavior.The "Loyalty/Betrayal" moral foundation tweets emphasize the internal loyalty of the Asian community and oppose betrayal.Tweets under "Authority/Subversion" dimension focus on the political awakening of Asians to defend their rights in the political arena and call for increased political participation.The "Fairness/Cheating" dimension highlights the racial divide between Asians and African-Americans that is rooted in America’s racist history,and opposes political deception.The "Sanctity/Degradation" dimension focuses on the cultural sphere and criticizes the "degraded" representation of Asian communities in film and television.Further examination of the data revealed that tweets using the “Harm”,“Authority”and “Cheating” moral foundations were the most contagious.In particular,the specific leaning dimensions are “Harm”,“Authority” and “Cheating”,i.e.,the higher the score of these three moral foundations,the more likely the tweets are to be retweeted and liked.While the “Sanctity” moral foundation reduces the information virality of the tweets,i.e.,tweets using this moral foundation are less likely to be retweeted or liked.