Moral and Affective Differences in U.S. Immigration Policy Debate on Twitter
Loading...
Fulltext URI
Document type
Text/Journal Article
Additional Information
Date
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Springer, London
Abstract
Understanding ideological conflict has been a topic of interest in CSCW, for example in Value Sensitive Design research. More specifically, understanding ideological conflict is important for studying social media platforms like Twitter, which provide the ability for people to freely express their thoughts and opinions on contentious political events. In this work, we examine Twitter data to understand the moral, affective, and cognitive differences in language use between two opposing sides of the political debate over immigration related issues in the United States in the year since the 2016 presidential election. In total, we analyzed and compared the language of 45,045 pro-immigration tweets and 11,213 anti-immigration tweets spread across this period. Based on Moral Foundations Theory used to understand ideological conflict, we found pro-immigration tweets to contain more language associated with moral foundations of harm, fairness, and loyalty. Anti-immigration tweets contained more language associated with moral foundations of authority, more words associated with cognitive rigidity and more 3rd person pronouns and negative emotion. We discuss the implications of our research for political communication over social media, and for incorporating Moral Foundations Theory into other CSCW research. We discuss the potential application of this theory for Value Sensitive Design research.
Description
Keywords
Citation
URI
URI
Collections
Endorsement
Review
Supplemented By
Referenced By
Number of citations to item: 30
- Fatih Bayrak, Sinan Alper (2021): A tale of two hashtags: An examination of moral content of pro‐ and anti‐government tweets in Turkey, In: European Journal of Social Psychology 3(51), doi:10.1002/ejsp.2763
- Itai Himelboim, Porismita Borah, Kyle Lorenzano, Jeonghyun Janice Lee, Xiaohui Cao (2025): If it Bleeds, it Doesn’t Lead: Emotional Appeals and Engagement in Immigration and Election Conversations on Twitter, In: Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 1-2(69), doi:10.1080/08838151.2025.2459948
- Andreia Martinho, Maarten Kroesen, Caspar Chorus (2024): Moral foundations in gender violence cases decided in Portuguese courts, In: European Journal of Criminology 5(21), doi:10.1177/14773708241229505
- Laura French Bourgeois, Victoria M. Esses (2024): Using Twitter to investigate discourse on immigration: the role of values in expressing polarized attitudes toward asylum seekers during the closure of Roxham Road, In: Frontiers in Social Psychology, doi:10.3389/frsps.2024.1376647
- Ashwin Rao, Nazanin Sabri, Siyi Guo, Louiqa Raschid, Kristina Lerman (2025): Public Health Messaging on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Observational Study, In: Journal of Medical Internet Research, doi:10.2196/63910
- Oscar Araque, Lorenzo Gatti, Kyriaki Kalimeri (2020): MoralStrength: Exploiting a moral lexicon and embedding similarity for moral foundations prediction, In: Knowledge-Based Systems, doi:10.1016/j.knosys.2019.105184
- Josefina Flores Morales, Fanni Farago (2021): “Of Course We Need to Help the Undocumented Immigrants!”: Twitter Discourse on the (Un)deservingness of Undocumented Immigrants in the United States during the COVID-19 Pandemic, In: Sociological Perspectives 5(64), doi:10.1177/07311214211005494
- Brendan Kennedy, Mohammad Atari, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Joe Hoover, Ali Omrani, Jesse Graham, Morteza Dehghani (2021): Moral concerns are differentially observable in language, In: Cognition, doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104696
- Juhi Mittal, Abha Belorkar, Vinit Jakhetiya, Venu Pokuri, Sharath Chandra Guntuku (2023): Language on Reddit Reveals Differential Mental Health Markers for Individuals posting in Immigration Communities, In: Proceedings of the 15th ACM Web Science Conference 2023, doi:10.1145/3578503.3583600
- Swapan Deep Arora, Guninder Pal Singh, Anirban Chakraborty, Moutusy Maity (2022): Polarization and social media: A systematic review and research agenda, In: Technological Forecasting and Social Change, doi:10.1016/j.techfore.2022.121942
- Eimon Amjadi, Richard S. John (2025): Count on Me: Moral Language in Social Media and Policy Discourse during the Ukraine-Russia Conflict, In: Data & Policy, doi:10.1017/dap.2024.98
- Tyler Jimenez, Jamie Arndt, Mark J. Landau (2021): Walls block waves: Using an inundation metaphor of immigration predicts support for a border wall, In: Journal of Social and Political Psychology 1(9), doi:10.5964/jspp.6383
- Saifuddin Ahmed, Kokil Jaidka, Vivian Hsueh Hua Chen, Mengxuan Cai, Anfan Chen, Claire Stravato Emes, Valerie Yu, Arul Chib (2024): Social media and anti-immigrant prejudice: a multi-method analysis of the role of social media use, threat perceptions, and cognitive ability, In: Frontiers in Psychology, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1280366
- Patrick Y. Wu, Jonathan Nagler, Joshua A. Tucker, Solomon Messing (2024): Concept-Guided Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Pairwise Comparison Scoring of Texts with Large Language Models, In: 2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData), doi:10.1109/bigdata62323.2024.10825235
- Shravika Mittal, Munmun De Choudhury (2023): Moral Framing of Mental Health Discourse and Its Relationship to Stigma: A Comparison of Social Media and News, In: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, doi:10.1145/3544548.3580834
- Riccardo Ricciardi (2024): Users’ self-description on social media: a methodology to integrate labels and textual information, In: Quality & Quantity 2(59), doi:10.1007/s11135-024-01988-6
- Fleur Bianco, Ankica Kosic, Antonio Pierro (2021): COVID-19 and prejudice against migrants: the mediating roles of need for cognitive closure and binding moral foundations. A comparative study, In: The Journal of Social Psychology 4(161), doi:10.1080/00224545.2021.1900046
- Hulya Dogan, Kiet Nguyen, Ismini Lourentzou (2024): Narrative Characteristics in Refugee Discourse: An Analysis of American Public Opinion on the Afghan Refugee Crisis After the Taliban Takeover, In: Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction CSCW1(8), doi:10.1145/3653703
- Livia van Vliet (2021): Moral Expressions in 280 Characters or Less: An Analysis of Politician Tweets Following the 2016 Brexit Referendum Vote, In: Frontiers in Big Data, doi:10.3389/fdata.2021.699653
- Maria Menendez-Blanco, Pernille Bjørn (2022): Designing Digital Participatory Budgeting Platforms: Urban Biking Activism in Madrid, In: Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 4(31), doi:10.1007/s10606-022-09443-6
- Samuel Schiffer, Nikola Mirilovic, Matthew Goldman (2023): Religion, Ideology, and Political Parties’ Positions on Refugees in South Asia and the Middle East, In: International Migration Review 2(59), doi:10.1177/01979183231162622
- Javier Alvarez-Galvez, Fermin L. Cruz, Jose A. Troyano (2023): Discovery and characterisation of socially polarised communities on social media, In: Scientific Reports 1(13), doi:10.1038/s41598-023-42592-2
- Anya Hommadova-Lu, Yelena Mejova (2025): Immigration discourse in a polarized era: Insights from social media before and after the 2020 US presidential election, In: International Journal of Intercultural Relations, doi:10.1016/j.ijintrel.2025.102162
- Trisha Harjani, Hongwei He, Melody Manchi Chao (2023): The Moral Foundations of Vaccine Passports, In: Journal of Business Ethics 1(190), doi:10.1007/s10551-023-05427-8
- Brandie Nonnecke, Gisela Perez de Acha, Annette Choi, Camille Crittenden, Fernando Ignacio Gutiérrez Cortés, Alejandro Martin Del Campo, Oscar Mario Miranda-Villanueva (2021): Harass, mislead, & polarize: An analysis of Twitter political bots’ tactics in targeting the immigration debate before the 2018 U.S. midterm election, In: Journal of Information Technology & Politics 4(19), doi:10.1080/19331681.2021.2004287
- Ashwin Rao, Nazanin Sabri, Siyi Guo, Louiqa Raschid, Kristina Lerman (2024): Public Health Messaging on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Observational Study (Preprint), doi:10.2196/preprints.63910
- Renáta Németh (2022): A scoping review on the use of natural language processing in research on political polarization: trends and research prospects, In: Journal of Computational Social Science 1(6), doi:10.1007/s42001-022-00196-2
- Xiaoya Jiang, Yini Zhang, Jisoo Kim, Jon Pevehouse, Dhavan Shah (2023): Talking Past Each Other on Twitter: Thematic, Event, and Temporal Divergences in Polarized Partisan Expression on Immigration, In: Political Communication 2(41), doi:10.1080/10584609.2023.2263400
- Dominik Neumann, Nancy Rhodes (2023): Morality in social media: A scoping review, In: New Media & Society 2(26), doi:10.1177/14614448231166056
- Shuo Niu, Katherine G. McKim, Kathleen Palm Reed (2022): Education, Personal Experiences, and Advocacy, In: Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction CSCW2(6), doi:10.1145/3555624