Moral divide in social media: A case of LGBT tweets

Abstract

While morality is a driving force to connect people and form groups, it can also divide groups into enemies and create conflicts. Social media can be involved in this process or even accelerate it. This paper examines the moral divide in social media by analyzing a large amount of LGBTrelated posts (tweets) collected from Twitter. Social trends related to LGBT groups include important moral challenges for societies seeking diversity. A network analysis of the spread of the LGBT tweets reveals that there are a small number of communities with a high degree of moral similarity (i.e., homophily). By analyzing the LGBT tweets using Moral Foundations Dictionaries for English and Japanese (MFD and J-MFD), we find that, in both English and Japanese users, they consider that LGBT is an “ingroup” issue or a moral concern that can threaten or violate a social group. Furthermore, we show that different communities tend to emphasize different moral foundations; in addition to “ingroup,” one community pays more attention to “harm” issue but others to “fairness” issue. This may be related to the moral divide in social media. These results provide important suggestions for understanding the moral divide in social media using computational social science approaches and for considering strategies to mitigate it.