On April 17, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area International Communication Research Institute hosted the 17th “Frontier Lecture on International Communication in the Greater Bay Area.” Professor Duan Zening from the National University of Singapore was invited to deliver a keynote lecture titled “When Machines Speak Morally: Synthetic Moral Appeals and the Dynamics of Online Message Retransmission.” During the lecture at the School of Journalism and Communication, Professor Duan examined the mechanisms behind “synthetic moral appeals” and discussed how algorithm-driven social bots leverage moralized language to attract public attention during global events such as the Russia-Ukraine conflict. By integrating computational communication with international communication studies, he offered new insights into how digital technologies shape online discourse. The session concluded with an interactive Q&A, which further deepened the audience’s understanding of information diffusion in the AI era.