A Sentiment Analysis on Roe v. Wade Twitter Data

Abstract

In May of 2022, the US Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization threatened to and did overturn Roe v. Wade, the historic 1973 Supreme Court case that created prenatal healthcare guidelines, including specifications for regulation of abortion. This work aims to investigate tweets on Roe v. Wade during a period of interest through posts on Twitter to provide an understanding of general public opinion. This was done primarily by running sentiment analysis on a dataset of 35,999 tweets from May 1st, 2022 to July 8th, 2022 from the #RoeVWade, separating them into negative, positive, and neutral sentiments, then finding collocations and often used hashtags in each category. Although the sentiment analysis model used classified sentiment rather than “pro-choice” versus “pro-life,” negative and neutral tweets were more likely to use phrases associated with “pro-choice” beliefs. In contrast, positive tweets often used hashtags aligned with Republican or conservative views.