Digital Moral Outrage,Collective Guilt,And Collective Action: An Examination of How Twitter Users Expressed Their Anguish During India's Covid-19 Related Migrant Crisis

Abstract

This paper examines the intersection of group-based expressions including digital moral outrage, collective guilt, and collective action on Twitter, following the tragic incident of 8 May 2020, in which 16 migrant workers were run over by a train after the Indian government imposed a sudden COVID-19-related lockdown. Twitter data were gathered immediately at three different times - May 8–15, May 16- 23, May 24-May 31, and 4598 tweets were manually coded. The analysis revealed that digital moral outrage was the most frequently expressed emotion. It, however, gradually decreased, signaling digital outrage fatigue. Collective guilt and sympathy constituted the second-largest portion of the total tweets, and tweets reflecting collective action by the community progressively increased. The network of relationships among different group-based emotions, the promotion of one-sided narratives and virtue signaling on social media platforms are discussed.

Keywords

digital moral outrage collective guilt collective action migrant crisis COVID-19 India Twitter

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Ananthakrishan

((2020, May 16). Can’t stop or monitor their movement on roads’: SC rejects plea seeking relief for migrants. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/supreme-court-on-migrant-workers-movement-on-roads-covid19-lockdown-6411143/.

Balakrishna

(2020, May 15). India’s migrant crisis: Trapped in a Covid spatial rift. https://epicenter.wcfia.harvard.edu/blog/indias-migrant-crisis-trapped-covid-spatial-rift .

Batson

C. D.

Kennedy

C. L.

Nord

L. A.

Stocks

E. L.

Fleming

D. Y. A.

Marzette

C. M.

Lishner

D. A.

Hayes

R. E.

Kolchinsky

L. M.

Zerger

(2007). Anger at unfairness: Is it moral outrage? European Journal of Social Psychology, 37(6), 1272–1285. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.434

Brady

W. J.

Crockett

M. J.

(2019). How effective is online outrage? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(2), 79–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.11.004

Brady

W. J.

Wills

J. A.

Burkart

Jost

J. T.

Van Bavel

J. J.

(2019). An ideological asymmetry in the diffusion of moralized content on social media among political leaders. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(10), 1802. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000532

Chakravarty

(2020, Sept 17). ‘Fake news’ did not trigger India’s worst migrant crisis. Government apathy did. Sroll.in. https://scroll.in/article/973301/fake-news-did-not-trigger-indias-worst-migrant-crisis-government-apathy-did.

Crockett

M. J.

(2017). Moral outrage in the digital age. Nature human behaviour, 1(11), 769–771. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0213-3

CSDS-Lokniti (2019). https://www.csds.in/uploads/custom_files/Report-SMPB.pdf.

Dutt

(2020, May 22). There is a humanitarian crisis in India. Lift the lockdown now. The Hindustan Times. Retrieved from: https://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/there-is-a-humanitarian-crisis-in-india-lift-the-lockdown-now/story-RHG3Mjv7B3VrNszdbTZ1UI.html.

10.

Elsa

(2020, June 1). Coronavirus: Hashtag #StepdownModi a top Twitter trend in India due to inaction over migrant workers’ woes, amid lockdown. Gulf News. Retrieved from: https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/india/coronavirus-hashtag-stepdownmodi-a-top-twitter-trend-in-india-due-to-inaction-over-migrant-workers-woes-amid-lockdown-1.1591021462925.

11.

First Post (2020, May 27). Twitterati slams govt over migrant crisis as ‘heart-wrenching’ video of toddler trying to wake mother who died onboard Shramik Special train, goes viral. Retrieved from: https://www.firstpost.com/health/twitterati-slams-govt-over-migrant-crisis-as-heart-wrenching-video-of-toddler-trying-to-wake-mother-who-died-onboard-shramik-special-train-goes-viral-8415631.html.

12.

Foster

M. D.

(2015). Tweeting about sexism: The well-being benefits of a social media collective action. British Journal of Social Psychology, 54(4), 629–647. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12101

13.

Harth

N. S.

Kessler

Leach

C. W.

(2008). Advantaged group's emotional reactions to intergroup inequality: The dynamics of pride, guilt, and sympathy. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(1), 115–129. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167207309193

14.

Infante

(2020). India’s Coronavirus migration crisis. Retrieved from https://daily.jstor.org/indias-migration-crisis/.

15.

Johnen

Jungblut

Ziegele

(2018). The digital outcry: what incites participation behavior in an online firestorm? New Media & Society, 20(9), 3140–3160. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817741883

16.

Jordan

J. J.

Rand

D. G.

(2020). Signaling when no one is watching: A reputation heuristics account of outrage and punishment in one-shot anonymous interactions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 118(1), 57. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000197

17.

Jost

J. T.

Becker

Osborne

Badaan

(2017). Missing in (collective) action: ideology, system justification, and the motivational antecedents of two types of protest behavior. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26(2), 99–108. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721417690633

18.

Krauth-Gruber

Bonnot

(2020). Collective guilt, moral outrage, and support for helping the poor: A matter of system versus in-group responsibility framing. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 30(1), 59–72. https://doi.org/10.1002/casp.2428

19.

Linewebber

Barr-Bryan

Zelditch

Jr (2015). Effects of a legitimate authority's justification of inequality on the mobilization of revolutionary coalitions. https://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/154812.

20.

Marietta

Farley

Cote

Murphy

(2017, July). The rhetorical psychology of trumpism: Threat, absolutism, and the absolutist threat. The Forum, 15(2), 313–332. De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/for-2017-0019

21.

Martin

Brickman

Murray

(1984). Moral outrage and pragmatism: explanations for collective action. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 20(5), 484–496. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(84)90039-8

22.

Pal

Panda

(2019). Twitter in the 2019 Indian general elections: trends of Use across states and parties. Economic & Political Weekly, 54(51). http://joyojeet.people.si.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Twitter-in-the-2019-Indian-General-Elections_-Trends-of- Use-Across-States-and-Parties.pdf.

23.

Puryear

(2020). The threat of virality: Digital outrage combats the spread of opposing ideas (Order No. 27831785). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (2405322885). Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/threat-virality-digital-outrage-combats-spread/docview/2405322885/se-2?accountid = 11563.

24.

Rothmund

Baumert

Zinkernagel

(2014). The German “Wutbürger”: How justice sensitivity accounts for individual differences in political engagement. Social Justice Research, 27(1), 24–44.

25.

Rothschild

Z. K.

Keefer

L. A.

(2017). A cleansing fire: moral outrage alleviates guilt and buffers threats to one’s moral identity. Motivation and Emotion, 41(2), 209–229. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-017-9601-2

26.

Runciman

W. G.

Routledge

(1966). Relative deprivation and social justice: A study of attitudes to social inequality in twentieth-century England (Vol. 13). Routledge & Kegan Paul.

27.

Saab

Tausch

Spears

Cheung

W. Y.

(2015). Acting in solidarity: testing an extended dual pathway model of collective action by bystander group members. British Journal of Social Psychology, 54(3), 539–560. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12095

28.

Spring

V. L.

Cameron

C. D.

Cikara

(2019). Asking different questions about outrage: A reply to brady and crockett. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(2), 80–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.11.006

29.

Strathern

Schoenfeld

Ghawi

Pfeffer

(2020, December). Against the Others! Detecting Moral Outrage in Social Media Networks. In 2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) (pp. 322–326). IEEE. https://https://doi.org/10.1109/ASONAM49781.2020.9381415.

30.

Tajfel

Turner

J. C.

(2004). The social identity theory of intergroup behavior. In Political psychology (pp. 33–47). Psychology Press.

31.

Thomas

E. F.

Mcgarty

Mavor

K. I.

(2009). Aligning identities, emotions, and beliefs to create commitment to sustainable social and political action. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 13(3), 194–218.

32.

Trottier

(2017). Digital vigilantism as weaponisation of visibility. Philosophy & Technology, 30(1), 55–72. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-016-0216-4

33.

Van Zomeren

Spears

Fischer

A. H.

Leach

C. W.

(2004). Put your money where your mouth is! explaining collective action tendencies through group-based anger and group efficacy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(5), 649. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.87.5.649

34.

Workneh

T. W.

(2021). Social media, protest, & outrage communication in Ethiopia: Toward fractured publics or pluralistic polity? Information, Communication & Society, 24(3), 309–328. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1811367

35.

Zhang

Pan

(2019). Casm: A deep-learning approach for identifying collective action events with text and image data from social media. Sociological Methodology, 49(1), 1–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/0081175019860244