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Category: Project

Description: This presidential campaign has been fraught with discussions of the morality (or lack there-of) of the candidates and their supporters. We sought to discover how the followers of four different presidential hopefuls spoke about morality. Previous research has presented two competing hypotheses: 1) conservatives will use similar moral language to other conservatives, and liberals will use similar language to other liberals and 2) moderates on both sides will be more similar to each other than their more extreme fellows. We collected tweets from Twitter users that followed Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders, or an apolitical celebrity, and used text analysis to examine their use of moral language. We found that Twitter users who followed more extreme candidates showed a different moral profile than their moderate counterparts.