PhD student Shadi Rezapour will present her research with the Diesner lab at the 22nd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2019), which will be held November 9-13 in Austin, Texas. CSCW brings together experts from industry and academia to explore the technical, social, material, and theoretical challenges of designing technology to support collaborative work and life activities.
Rezapour will present the poster, "How Do Moral Values Differ in Tweets on Social Movements?," which was coauthored by Informatics PhD student Priscilla Ferronato and Associate Professor and PhD Program Director Jana Diesner.
Abstract: In this paper, we analyze and compare the representation of social movements on social media from the perspective of morality. Following previous research, which found associations between morality, collective action, and social decision-making, we postulate that moral values are distinct across different movements since these movements represent moral values of those who support or oppose them. The result of our analysis of four movements as represented on Twitter (#BlackLivesMatter, #WhiteLivesMatter, #AllLivesMatter, and #BlueLivesMatter) reveal that #BlueLivesMatter represents values such as Care, Harm, Loyalty, and Authority, while #WhiteLivesMatter features Harm and Fairness. Moreover, we find that Harm is the most prominent moral value in all of our datasets. Our analysis provides a robust understanding of authors’ moral stances, which contextualizes the influence of movements on people, and how these movements are perceived in society.
Rezapour is conducting research on topics related to natural language processing, machine learning, and network analysis. She holds an MS in information management from Illinois.