Morality in social media: A scoping review

Abstract

Social media platforms have been adopted rapidly into our current culture and affect nearly all areas of our everyday lives. Their prevalence has raised questions about the influence of new communication technologies on moral reasoning, judgments, and behaviors. The present scoping review identified 80 articles providing an overview of scholarly work conducted on morality in social media. Screening for research that explicitly addressed moral questions, the authors found that research in this area tends to be atheoretical, US-based, quantitative, cross-sectional survey research in business, psychology, and communication journals. Findings suggested a need for increased theoretical contributions. The authors identified new developments in research analysis, including text scraping and machine coding, which may contribute to theory development. In addition, diversity across disciplines allows for a broad picture in this research domain, but more interdisciplinarity might be needed to foster creative approaches to this study area.

Moral Judgment and Social Critique in Journalistic News Satire

“…The aim of this study is to uncover what types of moral judgments appear in journalistic news satire and determine possible differences between satire from two different countries. Reviews of the literature on satire and morality show few cross-country comparisons (Leicht 2023) and a narrow focus on the U.S. context (Neumann and Rhodes 2023). This study expands the literature by including Swedish news satire alongside U.S. news satire.…”