Abortion pill marketing and sourcing on twitter following Dobbs v. Jackson supreme court ruling

Abstract

Objective

This study examines abortion-related discourse on Twitter (X) pre-and post-Dobbs v. Jackson ruling, which eliminated the constitutional right to abortion.

Study Design

We used a custom data collection tool to collect tweets directly from Twitter using abortion-related keywords. We used the BERTopic language model and examined the top 30 retweeted and top 30 textually similar tweets from relevant topic clusters using an inductive coding approach. We also conducted statistical testing to assess potential associations between abortion themes.

Results

166,799 unique tweets were collected from December 2020-December 2022. 464 unique tweets were coded for abortion-related themes with 154 identified as relevant. Of these, 66 tweets marketed abortion pills, 17 tweets were identified as offering consultations, and 91 tweets were relevant to self-managed abortion. All marketing and consultation tweets were posted post-Dobbs decision and 7 (7.69%) of self-managed tweets were posted pre-Dobbs versus 84 (92.30%) posted post-Dobbs. A positive association was found between tweets offering a medical consultation with tweets marketing abortion pills and discussing self-managed abortion.

Conclusion

This study detected online marketing of abortion pills, consultations and discussions about self-managed abortion following the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling. These results provide more context to the type of abortion-related information that is available online.

SHORT CONDENSATION

This study examined tweets occurring both pre and post Dobbs decision and identified relevant discussions about self-managed abortion services, marketing and sale of abortion pills, and offering purported medical consultations. These findings indicate that abortion-related tweets, particularly those marketing abortion medications, increased after the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling. These findings highlight the evolving abortion information environment in the United States on Twitter, which represents a platform where health and politicised issues are commonly discussed.

Keywords:

• Self-managed abortion
• abortion
• abortion pills

Acknowledgements

This manuscript has been seen by all authors, who have approved its content.

Ethical compliance

Not applicable/not required for this study. All information collected from this study was from the public domain and the study did not involve any interaction with users. Any user identifiable information was re- moved from the study results.

Disclosure statement

TJM, JL, and TKM are employees of the start-up company S-3 Research LLC. S-3 Research is a start-up originally funded by the National Institutes of Health – National Institute of Drug Abuse through a Small Business Innovation and Research contract for opioid-related social media research and technology commercialisation and currently has contracts and grants with Federal agencies. Author reports no other conflict of interest associated with this manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.