Mobilizing hate: moral emotional content and popular support for violence in online media

In coauthored work with Jeffrey Javed, we explore how information manipulation---specifically sensationalized and moralized framings of news articles or fake news---can be used to mobilize individuals to participate in violence against individuals and outgroups. To explore the link between online content, moral outrage, and support for violence, we use survey experiments and large-scale automated text analyses of populations of news articles and comments. In a preliminary analysis of large news corpora in the US, we find a significant positive relationship between moral-emotional language and support for violence and the use of hate speech in news forums. In survey experiments that will be fielded in fall, we will test how moral and emotional framing of content influences an individual's level of support for punitive violence against an individual or the outgroup to which they belong. This project contributes to our understanding of how violence can be mobilized using information and contributes to to important policy debates around fake news, content moderation, and freedom of speech.