Morality in social media: A scoping review

Social media platforms have been adopted rapidly into our current culture and affect nearly all areas of our everyday lives. Their prevalence has raised questions about the influence of new communication technologies on moral reasoning, judgments, and behaviors. The present scoping review identified 80 articles providing an overview of scholarly work conducted on morality in social media. Screening for research that explicitly addressed moral questions, the authors found that research in this area tends to be atheoretical, US-based, quantitative, cross-sectional survey research in business, psychology, and communication journals. Findings suggested a need for increased theoretical contributions. The authors identified new developments in research analysis, including text scraping and machine coding, which may contribute to theory development. In addition, diversity across disciplines allows for a broad picture in this research domain, but more interdisciplinarity might be needed to foster creative approaches to this study area.