Saturation of moral language predicts lower content engagement on social media
Abstract
Across 1,621,147 observations from Twitter, Reddit and 8chan, overall moral relevance is positively associated with engagement. Conditional on that relevance, greater moral density is associated with lower engagement. The study distinguishes these two dimensions of moral language and examines their joint relationship with online attention.
Type
Publication
Nature Human Behaviour
Moral loading and engagement across platforms. Candia, Atari, Kteily and Uzzi (2026), Figure 2. First published in Nature Human Behaviour (2026) by Springer Nature. DOI. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.
Cristian Candia
Associate Professor, Data Science Institute, School of Engineering, Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile. Director of CRiSS-LAB.
Cristian Candia is a computational social scientist studying human and collective behavior with large-scale data, network science, experiments, and AI.