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.

摘要

目标

本研究调查了在多布斯诉杰克逊案裁决前后, 推特上的堕胎相关话题。

研究设计

我们使用定制的数据收集工具, 通过堕胎相关关键词直接从推特上收集推文。我们使用BERTopic语言模型, 并采用归纳编码方法, 检查了相关主题集群中的前30个被转发最多的推文和前30个文本相似的推文。我们还进行了统计测试, 以评估堕胎主题之间的潜在关联。

结果

从2020年12月至2022年12月, 共收集了166,799条独特的推文。对464条独特的推文进行了堕胎相关主题编码, 其中154条被确定为相关推文。在这些推文中, 66条推文涉及堕胎药品的营销, 17条推文提供咨询服务, 91条推文与自我管理堕胎相关。所有的营销和咨询推文都是在多布斯裁决后发布的, 而自我管理推文中, 7条(7.69%)是在多布斯裁决前发布的, 84条(92.30%)是在多布斯裁决后发布的。提供医疗咨询的推文与堕胎药品营销和讨论自我管理堕胎的推文之间存在正相关。

结论

本研究在多布斯诉杰克逊裁决后检测到在线的堕胎药品营销、咨询服务和关于自我管理堕胎的讨论。这些结果提供了有关在线可获取堕胎信息的更多背景。

概述

本研究调查了多布斯裁决前后出现的推文, 并确定了与自我管理堕胎服务、堕胎药品营销和销售、以及提供所谓医疗咨询相关的讨论。这些发现表明, 在多布斯诉杰克逊裁决后, 堕胎相关的推文, 尤其是那些营销堕胎药物的推文有所增加。这些发现突显了推特上不断变化的美国堕胎信息环境, 该平台是一个常常讨论健康和政治化问题的地方。

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.