Tweeting Morals in the 2016 Election

This is a short piece comparing the moral language of people who followed Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders, and John Stamos on Twitter. Upon randomly selecting 15,000-20,000 followers of each person (total N = 86,061; total words = 141,903,439), we ran simple text analyses using the moral foundations dictionary. These analyses revealed that followers of Ted Cruz used more binding moral language and Sanders used more individualizing moral language relative to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Followers of Clinton and Trump used far less moral language than the followers of Cruz and Sanders.