Motivation, Attention, and Visual Platform Design: How Moral Contagions Spread on TikTok and Instagram in the 2024 United States Presidential Election
This research addresses how social media platforms shape political moralization, offering insights for policymakers and researchers on digital discourse, though it is incremental in building on existing studies of platform effects.
The study analyzed over 3 million posts on TikTok and Instagram during the 2024 US presidential election, finding that moralization of issues like abortion and immigration is driven by platform-specific factors such as algorithms and demographics, with TikTok enabling viral spread and Instagram amplifying economic discourse.
Visual social media platforms have become primary venues for political discourse, yet we know little about how moralization operates differently across platforms and topics. Analyzing 2,027,595 TikToks and 1,126,972 Instagram posts during the 2024 US presidential election, we demonstrate that issues are not necessarily inherently moralized, but a product of audience demographics, platform architecture, and partisan framing. Using temporal supply-demand analysis and moral foundations scoring (eMFD), we examine the dynamics of key electoral issues. Three key findings emerge. First, moralization patterns diverge dramatically by platform: TikTok's algorithm enabled viral spread of moralized abortion and immigration content despite lower supply, while Instagram amplified economic discourse that aligned supply and demand. Second, traditionally "pragmatic" economic issues became moralized-cryptocurrency discourse invoked loyalty and authority foundations more strongly than any other topic, framing regulation as government overreach. Third, platforms responded to different events: TikTok surged after Harris's nomination across all topics (96% reduction in supply volatility), while Instagram spiked around cryptocurrency policy developments. Semantic network analysis reveals TikTok's circular topology enables cross-cutting exposure while Instagram's fragmented structure isolates Harris from economic discourse. These findings demonstrate that understanding political moralization requires examining platform-specific ecosystems where architecture, demographics, and content strategy interact to determine which issues get moralized and how moral content spreads.