Social media posts may signal whether a protest will become violent

A USC-led study of violent protest has found that moral rhetoric on Twitter may signal whether a protest will turn violent. The researchers also found that people are more likely to endorse violence when they moralize the issue that they are protesting--and when they believe that others in their social network moralize that issue, too. "Extreme movements can emerge through social networks," said the study's corresponding author, Morteza Dehghani, a researcher at the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC. "We have seen several examples in recent years, such as the protests in Baltimore and Charlottesville, where people's perceptions are influenced by the activity in their social networks. People identify others who share their beliefs and interpret this as consensus. In these studies, we show that this can have potentially dangerous consequences."