In this paper, we study the moral framing of political content on Twitter.
Specifically, we examine differences in moral framing in two datasets: (i)
tweets from US-based politicians annotated with political affiliation and (ii)
COVID-19 related tweets in German from followers of the leaders of the five
major Austrian political parties. Our research is based on recent work that
introduces an unsupervised approach to extract framing bias and intensity in
news using a dictionary of moral virtues and vices. In this paper, we use a
more extensive dictionary and adapt it to German-language tweets. Overall, in
both datasets, we observe a moral framing that is congruent with the public
perception of the political parties. In the US dataset, democrats have a
tendency to frame tweets in terms of care, while loyalty is a characteristic
frame for republicans. In the Austrian dataset, we find that the followers of
the governing conservative party emphasize care, which is a key message and
moral frame in the party's COVID-19 campaign slogan. Our work complements
existing studies on moral framing in social media. Also, our empirical findings
provide novel insights into moral-based framing on COVID-19 in Austria.Comment: Accepted for publication in ICWSM-2021 - link to published version
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