Scientific Meeting 2023 - Lightning Talks Day 1

Monday, March 13
11:40am to 12:30pm

Presenter: Danny Valdez

‘A monumental blow to the reproductive rights movement’: Modeling online reactions to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization SCOTUS Ruling with Natural Language Processing and Neural Networks

Valdez, Danny; Jozkowski, Kristen, N; Mena-Melendez, Lucrecia; Crawford, Brandon L.; Arvind, Akshat

Background: On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade, ending a 49-year precedent establishing abortion before viability as a constitutionally protected right in the US. Predictably, the aftermath of the SCOTUS ruling saw increases in social media activity related to abortion and Roe v. Wade, affording the opportunity to model these data for insights into nationwide abortion climate. Purpose: This study characterizes social media reactions for themes related to the overturn of Roe v. Wade (beginning May 17--the date an unofficial Dobbs ruling was leaked to the public--and ending June 29, 2022--one week post Dobbs decision).

Methods: We leveraged Twitter’s API to collect (N=4,353,103) tweets. We applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic models with qualitative inductive coding to generate themes. We then applied a Sentence Bi-directional Encoder from Transformers (S-BERT) analysis to evaluate daily themes and longitudinal changes in themes over time. Finally, we applied a sentiment analysis to measure affect and changes in daily posting volume.

Results: Public reactions to the Dobbs decision were largely negative. Indeed, most topics generated from our corpus likewise reflected multiple domains of reproductive rights and access and how the Dobbs aftermath would negatively affect such care. Only a few topics indicated support for SCOTUS’ actions, which framed the Dobbs outcome as a victory for the unborn and support for former President Trump’s SCOTUS appointees.

Discussion and Conclusion: Although reactions to the Dobbs ruling were in support of abortion, people’s inability to remain engaged overtime may reflect only passive interest or complex beliefs about abortion. However, public apathy holds serious implications for other social issues that will likely be heard before SCOTUS in coming terms, including the right to contraception, same sex marriage, and other issues.