Finding 4: Moralization both spread into new topics (hobbies, entertainment) AND intensified within already moralized topics (e.g., politics). But we only observed intensification on Twitter/X, which again, suggests platform design may matter when it comes to mitigating runaway mitigation.

Finding 2: Moralization increased relatively less in traditional media. Rate of moral words in Corpus of Contemporary American English increased, but occurred almost entirely in a single year (1.11% to 1.31% in 2016), and moral words actually decreased over time in the News on the Web corpus.

Finding 1: Moralization increased significantly on social media. Rate of moral words increased on Twitter/X by 41% from 2013-2021 (1.28% of words in posts to 1.80%) and word embeddings showed topics shifted .296 SD toward morality. Moral words also increased on Reddit, to a lesser degree: by 6%

Social media lets people share their perspectives globally and instantaneously for the first time in history. But it can also incentivize people to boil complex issues into simplistic, moralized narratives. This might create a moralizing shift in discourse, which we identify and explain here.

New preprint! We developed new measurement tools to examine moralization in ~2B Twitter/X & Reddit posts and ~5M traditional media texts.

Key finding: moralization increased markedly on social media from 2013-2021; more than traditional media; associated with multiple user dynamics
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If you want to see more of our data on longitudinal trends in moralization, I'm giving a symposium talk tomorrow morning at 8:00AM in Four Seasons Ballroom 1 #SPSP2025