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.