The Correlation Between Moral Lexicon and Violent Protests

Abstract

Various distinct, discrete, and dispersed factors can transform a non-violent social movement into a violent social movement, making such transitions extremely challenging to predict. In this thesis, I develop an analytical approach for predicting the mobilization of violent social movements using a newly expanded multilingual Moral Foundations Dictionary to quantify references to moral categories in geo-referenced social media feeds. This is combined with event data on the timing and location of violent protests in Africa to develop an analytic framework for large-scale, high-resolution assessment and predictions of violent political protests. The evidence shows that a significant relationship exists between social media messages with moral content and the probability of violent protest, which significantly increases the chances that asocial movement becomes hostile and violent.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2022
Accession Number
AD1173470

Entities

People

  • William C. Reber

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Cyber
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • California
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Data Analysis
  • Databases
  • Geography
  • Human Behavior
  • International Organizations
  • Internet
  • Language
  • National Security
  • Personality
  • Psychology
  • Social Media
  • Social Networking Services
  • Social Networks
  • Social Psychology
  • Societies

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Political Violence and Terrorism Studies.