Moral Framing in Election-Adjacent YouTube Content: The 2022 Philippine Presidential Campaign

Abstract

The 2022 Philippine presidential race was the country's most digitally contested to date, with YouTube serving as a key venue for building, spreading, and challenging political and moral appeals. While scholars have examined official campaign materials, coordinated influencer networks, and disinformation ecosystems, the political undertones of informal, election-adjacent YouTube content remain comparatively unexamined. This paper presents a qualitative content analysis of three such videos: “Wag Magpapabudol,” a voter-awareness advertisement fronted by actress Angelica Panganiban; “Bitter Len-Len,” a scripted web-series segment featuring Senator Imee Marcos dismissing online critics as bitter “bashers”; and “Nauto ka na ba ng mga nagmamalinis?”, a lifestyle vlog addressing performative moral superiority. Using framing theory, the study traces how political and moral frames are built and differentiated across this spectrum of advocacy, commentary, and lifestyle content, all of which engage the campaign's moral economy through the themes of voter deception, voter irrationality, and moral hypocrisy. Independently verified YouTube metrics show that a production house's existing audience predicted a video's reach more strongly than how explicitly it engaged the campaign's politics. The paper argues that moral framing in election-adjacent YouTube content works as a form of political persuasion operating beneath the threshold of formal campaign communication and proposes a transferable analytical procedure for examining YouTube video corpora in electoral settings.