Partner: Digital Planet, Tufts University
Project: Roe V. Wade Supreme Court Decision: Twitter’s Decidedly Negative Reaction
Date: 2022
Digital Planet, Tufts University - Roe V. Wade Supreme Court Decision
As part of our ongoing collaboration with the Digital Planet team at the Fletcher School, Tufts University we traced the historic developments of the undoing of the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe V. Wade throughout 2022.
Using our AI and NLP algorithms to uncover human perceptions at scale, this piece of research reveals the sentiment and emotions related to the key events linked to the ending of the constitutional right to an abortion in the US.
Figure 1 - Disgust and sadness are the main emotions experienced online through April and June
Temporal analysis revealed overwhelmingly negative sentiment and the dominant emotions felt at different points throughout 2022. For example, it compared emotions expressed online on May 2nd, when Politico published a leak of the draft majority opinion and then evaluated the change following the official announcement by the Supreme Court made on June 24th.
Through a gender lens, we examined the variance in emotions felt by men and women following the news and found that disgust dominated conversations of both sexes almost equally.
Figure 2 - Men and women expressed similar emotions following the news about the overturning of Roe V. Wade