Moral evaluations about COVID-19 news on Facebook: A qualitative study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4067/S0718-48672022000100043Keywords:
social networks, online morality, moral philosophy, social cognition, COVID-19Abstract
The research studies the types of moral evaluations in the comments associated with news about the COVID-19 pandemic in Costa Rica on the social network Facebook. At the conceptual level, the study establishes relationships between the socio-cognition of moral evaluation and moral philosophy. A qualitative study was carried out, following a phenomenological design. The analysis corpus was the national news about COVID-19 published on four main visited digital platforms on Facebook and the comments responding to said news between February and April 2021. It was found that in the face of news articles that present consequentialist and deontological evaluative content, they presented a greater diversity of types of moral evaluations in the comments. While consequentialist evaluations prevail in articles, virtuous ones predominate in comments. The implications of these results are discussed from the perspective of forming public opinion around the pandemic.
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