Analyzing Reddit Forums Specific to Abortion That Yield Diverse Dialogues Pertaining to Medical Information Seeking and Personal Worldviews: Data Mining and Natural Language Processing Comparative Study.
Danny ValdezLucrecia Mena-MeléndezBrandon L CrawfordKristen N JozkowskiPublished in: Journal of medical Internet research (2024)
Our findings suggest that people posting on abortion forums on Reddit are willing to share their beliefs, which manifested in diverse ways, such as sharing abortion stories including how their worldview changed, which critiques the value of dichotomized abortion identity labels, and information seeking. Notably, the style of discourse varied significantly by subreddit. r/Abortion was principally leveraged as an information and outreach source; r/AbortionDebate largely centered on debating across various legal, ethical, and moral abortion domains. Collectively, our findings suggest that abortion remains an opaque yet politically charged issue for people and that social media can be leveraged to understand views and circumstances surrounding abortion.