#RoeOverturned: Twitter Dataset on the Abortion Rights Controversy

Abstract

On June 24, 2022, the United States Supreme Court overturned landmark rulings made in its 1973 verdict in Roe v. Wade. The justices by way of a majority vote in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, decided that abortion wasn't a constitutional right and returned the issue of abortion to the elected representatives. This decision triggered multiple protests and debates across the US, especially in the context of the midterm elections in November 2022. Given that many citizens use social media platforms to express their views and mobilize for collective action, and given that online debate provides tangible effects on public opinion, political participation, news media coverage, and the political decision-making, it is crucial to understand online discussions surrounding this topic. Toward this end, we present the first large-scale Twitter dataset collected on the abortion rights debate in the United States. We present a set of 74M tweets systematically collected over the course of one year

Analyzing the Stance of Facebook Posts on Abortion Considering State-Level Health and Social Compositions

“…Analysis of abortion online discussions. Previous research showed that social media might be a great tool to analyze public attitudes on different topics (Karamouzas, Mademlis, and Pitas 2022;ALDayel and Magdy 2021;Chang et al 2023). For example, one study found that there was an increased interest in posting abortion-related tweets in the period of early May of 2023, before the official overturning of Roe v. Wade (Mane et al 2022).…”

“…Also, previous research found that gender and political affiliation were associated with the use of incivility and intolerance in abortion referendum Twitter discussions (Oh et al 2021). Finally, there are certain publicly available datasets that include abortion-related posts (Mohammad et al 2016;Stab et al 2018;Chang et al 2023).…”

“…People tend to discuss matters such as political issues and abortion on social media (Karamouzas, Mademlis, and Pitas 2022;ALDayel and Magdy 2021;Chang et al 2023;Li and Xiao 2020). Furthermore, Facebook still remains one of the most utilized platforms (Pew Research Center 2021).…”

“…They found that more participants supported Roe v. Wade than opposed it, while greater knowledge about Roe v. Wade was correlated with larger support for maintaining it. In the literature, social media has also been shown as an effective tool to monitor public opinions on certain topics (Karamouzas, Mademlis, and Pitas 2022;ALDayel and Magdy 2021;Chang et al 2023). Therefore, this study analyzes the stance of social media posts towards abortion at the state level in the US right after the Supreme Court's draft about overturning Roe v. Wade had been disclosed.…”

Sentiment Analysis and Text Analysis of the Public Discourse on Twitter about COVID-19 and MPox

“…Twitter is the most used social media platform amongst journalists [5] and ranks amongst the most popular social media platforms on a global scale [6]. Twitter has been highly popular amongst data scientists and computer science researchers for studying, analyzing, modeling, and interpreting social media communications related to various topics, such as ChatGPT [7], the Russia-Ukraine war [8], cryptocurrency markets [9], virtual assistants [10], mental health [11], loneliness in the elderly [12], housing needs of low-income families [13], animal welfare [14], climate change [15], cognitive impairment [16], the electronics industry [17], agriculture [18], race and ethnicity [19], fake news [20], abortion [21], religion [22], fall detection [23,24], gender identity [25], elections [26], politics [27], food insufficiency [28], pregnancy [29], drug safety [30], indoor localization [31], gambling [32], education systems [33], exoskeletons [34], personalized medicine [35], natural disasters [36], crimes [37], democracy [38], and transportation [39], just to name a few. In addition to the above, Twitter data mining and analysis has also attracted the attention of healthcare researchers, epidemiologists, and medical practitioners, as is evident from several works that focused on the mining and analysis of tweets related to pandemics, epidemics, viruses, and diseases such as Ebola [40], E-Coli [...…”