Moral framing and information virality in social movements: A case study of #HongKongPoliceBrutality

ABSTRACT

Guided by moral foundation theory and information virality theory, this study explored how moral framing, operationalized as the use of one of the five moral dimensions in tweets (i.e., care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity), is related to virality of social movement messages. It offered a case study of the 2019 Hong Kong protests by analyzing Twitter data collected using #HongKongPoliceBrutality. Results demonstrated that care framing promotes message virality, indicated by the likelihood of getting retweeted and favorited. However, the use of the fairness or authority frame decreased virality. Results indicated that the supporters of the movement were more likely to be triggered by non-political messages. The effect of moral framing on information virality was contingent upon the audience.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral framing
• moral foundation theory
• police brutality
• social media
• information virality

This article refers to:

Rejoinder: How methodological decisions impact the validity of moral content analyses

Different pathways to identify moral framing from media content: A response to Hopp and Weber

Reflections on extracting moral foundations from media content

Notes

1 We selected the top retweeted tweets rather than taking a random sampling approach because both dependent variables were highly skewed. Random sampling may select disproportionately less visible messages about the movement. The distribution of the retweet frequency showed a significant decrease in the frequency number (5 and less) when it hit the top 20% of the tweets. The selection of the top 20% allowed us to focus on viral tweets but also to include a sample with a significant variance in both outcome variables.