# Moral Outrage Shapes Commitments Beyond Attention: Multimodal Moral Emotions on YouTube in Korea and the US

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21815 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21815/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [Multimodal Learning with Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06488/) (2022)
- [Moral Emotions Shape the Virality of COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03590/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Machine Behavior in Relational Moral Dilemmas: Moral Rightness, Predicted Human Behavior, and Model Decisions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21871/) (2026)
- [Cross-National Information Attacks: A Two-Decade Analysis of Troll Behavior in Korea](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22785/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding how media rhetoric shapes audience engagement is crucial in the attention economy. This study examines how moral emotional framing by mainstream news channels on YouTube influences user behavior across Korea and the United States. To capture the platform's multimodal nature, combining thumbnail images and video titles, we develop a multimodal moral emotion classifier by fine tuning a vision language model. The model is trained on human annotated multimodal datasets in both languages and applied to approximately 400,000 videos from major news outlets. We analyze engagement levels including views, likes, and comments, representing increasing degrees of commitment. The results show that other condemning rhetoric expressions of moral outrage that criticize others morally consistently increase all forms of engagement across cultures, with effects ranging from passive viewing to active commenting. These findings suggest that moral outrage is a particularly effective emotional strategy, attracting not only attention but also active participation. We discuss concerns about the potential misuse of other condemning rhetoric, as such practices may deepen polarization by reinforcing in group and out group divisions. To facilitate future research and ensure reproducibility, we publicly release our Korean and English multimodal moral emotion classifiers.