Ege Tütüncüler, Ece Mutlu and Ivan Garibay
In this paper, Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) is used to quantify and measure the moral rhetoric in the Facebook posts of Democratic and Republican candidates for the House of Representatives and the Senate, for the upcoming 2020 US presidential elections. We identified the moral loadings of the Facebook posts of the candidates in the five moral dimensions of MFT, for both vice and virtue categories. The results indicate that posts of House candidates contain a greater amount of moral loading than the posts of Senate candidates. Furthermore, House candidates tend to share posts that involve a stronger moral rhetoric compared to the posts of Senate candidates. Also, posts of all candidates include more Care, Harm and Authority related rhetoric, among all morality dimensions. Finally, we conclude that the likelihood of expressing multiple morality dimensions in a single post is higher for the Democrats, while Republicans are more likely to express a single moral rhetoric.