ACM WebSci 2025

Our paper “Beyond Sentiment: Examining the Role of Moral Foundations in User Engagement with News on Twitter” will be presented at ACM WebSci 2025!

Which are the main affective and moral elements characterising the news on Twitter? And how much do affective and moral content relate to user engagement?

This are some of the questions that we explore in the work, by tracking 8 US news outlets and their followers in Twitter between 2020-2021. To do this, we analyze +100k news outlet’s tweets and the Twitter conversations arising from them.

We perform consensus clustering to classify the original tweets into news macro areas that cover the main discussion topics during 2020-2021 in the US, such as Covid, Black Lives Matter, elections, and climate change. Then, we assess the emotional and moral content in the tweets and their impact on user engament in terms of retweets, quotes, replies, and likes.

Our findings show that news outlet tweets employ diverse affective and moral characteristics in their reporting according to the topic: e.g., around BLM, harm and subversion values prevail, while Covid-related news tweets have a particular emphasis on fear, sadness and degradation. We also find that surprise and trust emotions together with disgust values are consistently related to a positive increase across all the engagement metrics. On the contrary, fear and anticipation emotions are associated with less engagement.

These highlighted insights contribute to a deeper understanding of the interplay between news coverage and the moral and emotional triggering of user engagement in media.