All is Fair in Love and War: Moral Foundations in English-Language Tweets during the First 36 Weeks of Conflict Between Ukraine and Russia

Amjadi, Eimon; John, Richard

All is Fair in Love and War: Moral Foundations in English-Language Tweets during the First 36 Weeks of Conflict Between Ukraine and Russia

Files

0248.pdf (1.01 MB)

Date

2024-01-03

Authors

Amjadi, Eimon

John, Richard

Starting Page

2546

Abstract

We apply Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) to explore how the public conceptualizes the current conflict between Ukraine and the Russian Federation (Russia). Our analysis includes over 1.1 million English Tweets over the first 36 weeks related to the conflict. We used a LIWC (Luke) moral foundations dictionary to identify the moral components (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity) of tweets from the U.S., pre- and post-Cold War NATO countries, Ukraine, and Russia. Following an initial spike at the beginning of the conflict, tweet volume declined and stabilized by week ten. The level of moral content varied significantly across the five regions and the five moral components. Tweets from different regions included significantly different moral foundations to conceptualize the conflict. Across all regions, tweets were dominated by loyalty content, while fairness content was infrequent. Moral content over time was relatively stable, and variations were linked to reported conflict events.

Keywords

Data Analytics, Data Mining, and Machine Learning for Social Media, liwc., moral foundations theory, social media, text analysis, twitter

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/10125/106690

Extent

8 pages

Related To

Proceedings of the 57th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

Rights

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Collections

Data Analytics, Data Mining, and Machine Learning for Social Media

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