  For years, many studies employed sentiment analysis to understand the
reasoning behind people's choices and feelings, their communication styles, and
the communities which they belong to. We argue that gaining more in-depth
insight into moral dimensions coupled with sentiment analysis can potentially
provide superior results. Understanding moral foundations can yield powerful
results in terms of perceiving the intended meaning of the text data, as the
concept of morality provides additional information on the unobservable
characteristics of information processing and non-conscious cognitive
processes. Therefore, we studied latent moral loadings of Syrian White
Helmets-related tweets of Twitter users from April 1st, 2018 to April 30th,
2019. For the operationalization and quantification of moral rhetoric in
tweets, we use Extended Moral Foundations Dictionary in which five
psychological dimensions (Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, In-group/Loyalty,
Authority/Respect and Purity/Sanctity) are considered. We show that people tend
to share more tweets involving the virtue moral rhetoric than the tweets
involving the vice rhetoric. We observe that the pattern of the moral rhetoric
of tweets among these five dimensions are very similar during different time
periods, while the strength of the five dimension is time-variant. Even though
there is no significant difference between the use of Fairness/Reciprocity,
In-group/Loyalty or Purity/Sanctity rhetoric, the less use of Harm/Care
rhetoric is significant and remarkable. Besides, the strength of the moral
rhetoric and the polarization in morality across people are mostly observed in
tweets involving Harm/Care rhetoric despite the number of tweets involving the
Harm/Care dimension is low.
