“Why should Facebook (not) ban trump?”: connecting divides in reasoning and morality in public deliberation

ABSTRACT

The divides between social groups in American society today extend from political opinion to lifestyle and emotions. A less explored area, however, is how these divides relate to potential divides in morality. The Habermasian conceptualization of the public sphere prioritizes deliberative reasoning as a way to solve moral conflicts. In contrast, this study argues that divides in reasoning and opinion are associated with divides in morality. To make the argument, this study focuses on the case of public debates over whether social media companies should deplatform Trump and his supporters in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection. Public comments were obtained from a dataset compiled and released by Facebook Oversight Board. First, I used structural topic modeling to identify the reasoning and used the dictionary based on the Moral Foundations Theory to gauge moral foundations in each document. Then, I used statistical analysis to examine whether there was a correlation between specific reasoning and moral foundations. The results show that the pro- and anti-deplatforming camps in the debate are divided not only in reasoning, but also in morality. Supporters of deplatforming argue that it would fulfill tech companies’ public responsibility, and protect society at large. These arguments are correlated with the care foundation. In contrast, opponents argue that deplatforming Trump violated freedom of speech. This argument is correlated with the fairness, loyalty, and authority foundations, but not the care foundation. The findings support my argument that divides in reasoning should be analyzed with consideration of morality.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital public sphere
• morality
• mixed-methods
• computational social science
• deplatforming
• social media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See the full list of board members at https://oversightboard.com/meet-the-board/

2 There has been some discussion of a sixth moral foundation of liberty (Haidt, 2012), however, it is less established and agreed upon.

3 The sum is less than 100% because two topics were excluded based on the validity analysis, as explained above.

4 This is likely to be a typo for Antifa. I kept it as it is in the original comment.

5 For clarity, Table 2 presents only Pearson coefficients. Results for both coefficients are provided in Appendix 3 in the supplementary materials.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zhifan Luo

Zhifan Luo is a Visiting Research Fellow at Institute for Research on Digital Literacies at York University, Canada. Her research investigates discursive power, digital public sphere, and digital authoritarianism. Her work has appeared in Information, Communication & Society, Armed Forces & Society, China: An International Journal, Journal of World-Systems Research, and Global Health Promotion.