Moral Outrage Shapes Commitments Beyond Attention: Multimodal Moral Emotions on YouTube in Korea and the US

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Park, Seongchan, Kim, Jaehong, Kim, Hyeonseung, Bin, Heejin, Moon, Sue, Lee, Wonjae
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Park, Seongchan
Kim, Jaehong
Kim, Hyeonseung
Bin, Heejin
Moon, Sue
Lee, Wonjae
author_facet Park, Seongchan
Kim, Jaehong
Kim, Hyeonseung
Bin, Heejin
Moon, Sue
Lee, Wonjae
contents Understanding how media rhetoric shapes audience engagement is crucial in the attention economy. This study examines how moral emotional framing by mainstream news channels on YouTube influences user behavior across Korea and the United States. To capture the platform's multimodal nature, combining thumbnail images and video titles, we develop a multimodal moral emotion classifier by fine tuning a vision language model. The model is trained on human annotated multimodal datasets in both languages and applied to approximately 400,000 videos from major news outlets. We analyze engagement levels including views, likes, and comments, representing increasing degrees of commitment. The results show that other condemning rhetoric expressions of moral outrage that criticize others morally consistently increase all forms of engagement across cultures, with effects ranging from passive viewing to active commenting. These findings suggest that moral outrage is a particularly effective emotional strategy, attracting not only attention but also active participation. We discuss concerns about the potential misuse of other condemning rhetoric, as such practices may deepen polarization by reinforcing in group and out group divisions. To facilitate future research and ensure reproducibility, we publicly release our Korean and English multimodal moral emotion classifiers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_21815
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Moral Outrage Shapes Commitments Beyond Attention: Multimodal Moral Emotions on YouTube in Korea and the US
Park, Seongchan
Kim, Jaehong
Kim, Hyeonseung
Bin, Heejin
Moon, Sue
Lee, Wonjae
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Social and Information Networks
Understanding how media rhetoric shapes audience engagement is crucial in the attention economy. This study examines how moral emotional framing by mainstream news channels on YouTube influences user behavior across Korea and the United States. To capture the platform's multimodal nature, combining thumbnail images and video titles, we develop a multimodal moral emotion classifier by fine tuning a vision language model. The model is trained on human annotated multimodal datasets in both languages and applied to approximately 400,000 videos from major news outlets. We analyze engagement levels including views, likes, and comments, representing increasing degrees of commitment. The results show that other condemning rhetoric expressions of moral outrage that criticize others morally consistently increase all forms of engagement across cultures, with effects ranging from passive viewing to active commenting. These findings suggest that moral outrage is a particularly effective emotional strategy, attracting not only attention but also active participation. We discuss concerns about the potential misuse of other condemning rhetoric, as such practices may deepen polarization by reinforcing in group and out group divisions. To facilitate future research and ensure reproducibility, we publicly release our Korean and English multimodal moral emotion classifiers.
title Moral Outrage Shapes Commitments Beyond Attention: Multimodal Moral Emotions on YouTube in Korea and the US
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21815