Digital Moral Discourse on Altruism: An Exploratory Qualitative Study of Public Evaluation on Facebook and YouTube

Abstract

This study examines how altruistic acts are publicly evaluated in social-media comment spaces and how moral meaning is constructed through praise, religious framing, obligation, scepticism, and accountability. A fixed analytic corpus of 700 publicly visible comments was compiled from two high-engagement cases on YouTube and Facebook and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis alongside a discourse-oriented reading of evaluative language. The interpretation is informed by symbolic interactionism, Durkheimian moral integration, Maussian reciprocity, Habermasian public-sphere theory, the sociology of evaluation, and research on platform affordances. Six primary evaluative orientations were identified: affective legitimation and praise (55%), religious anchoring (15%), moral obligation and directive language (12%), expansion of moral boundaries and norm enforcement (8%), scepticism and motive scrutiny (7%), and cynicism or moral fatigue (3%). The findings indicate that the two comment threads were predominantly supportive but not uncritical: participants affirmed altruistic actors, translated individual acts into wider moral duties, and simultaneously scrutinised authenticity and sustainability. Religious and emotional vocabularies were especially prominent, and the two cases also displayed different styles of interaction consistent with platform affordances; however, these differences do not establish causal effects. The study therefore conceptualises digital comment spaces as sites of public moral evaluation in which legitimation and contestation coexist. The proposed conceptual model is exploratory and hypothesis-generating rather than statistically generalisable. The results contribute to a sociology of digital morality that gives greater attention to constructive moral expression alongside the better-established literature on outrage, conflict, and polarisation.