A tale of two hashtags: An examination of moral content of pro- and anti-government tweets in Turkey

Abstract

During the campaign period of the 2018 Presidential Election in Turkey, there was a burst in the number of tweets posted by both pro- and anti-government Twitter users. Both sides started their own hashtags and reached a total of 2 million tweets in only one day. We analyzed the content of 186,554 tweets from two opposing ideological camps to test the predictions of Moral Foundations Theory, which suggests that liberals and conservatives endorse different moral foundations. We scored each side's level of emphasis on different moral foundations using the Turkish Moral Foundations Dictionary and compared the two groups. Results revealed that the supporters of the conservative government in Turkey were more likely to endorse care, loyalty, and authority foundations of morality, as compared to those who oppose the conservative government. In addition, the general moral emphasis was higher in the tweets of the pro-government group. Being one of the first studies investigating the moral content of political tweets in a non-WEIRD context, the current study yields important findings regarding the external validity of the Moral Foundations Theory's predictions in different cultures.