Polarized Online Discourse on Abortion: Frames and Hostile Expressions among Liberals and Conservatives

TL;DR

This study analyzes over 3.5 million tweets over a year to examine how liberals and conservatives in the US discuss abortion, revealing polarization in framing and hostility that intensifies around key events post-Roe v. Wade overturn.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive longitudinal analysis of online abortion discourse, highlighting distinct framing and hostility patterns among liberals and conservatives using transformer-based classifiers.

Findings

Liberals and conservatives mirror each other's hostility levels.

Distinct frames are used by each side to discuss abortion.

Hostile expressions increase around key events post-Roe v. Wade.

Abstract

Abortion has been one of the most divisive issues in the United States. Yet, missing is comprehensive longitudinal evidence on how political divides on abortion are reflected in public discourse over time, on a national scale, and in response to key events before and after the overturn of Roe v Wade. We analyze a corpus of over 3.5M tweets related to abortion over the span of one year (January 2022 to January 2023) from over 1.1M users. We estimate users' ideology and rely on state-of-the-art transformer-based classifiers to identify expressions of hostility and extract five prominent frames surrounding abortion. We use those data to examine (a) how prevalent were expressions of hostility (i.e., anger, toxic speech, insults, obscenities, and hate speech), (b) what frames liberals and conservatives used to articulate their positions on abortion, and (c) the prevalence of hostile expressions in liberals and conservative discussions of these frames. We show that liberals and conservatives largely mirrored each other's use of hostile expressions: as liberals used more hostile rhetoric, so did conservatives, especially in response to key events. In addition, the two groups used distinct frames and discussed them in vastly distinct contexts, suggesting that liberals and conservatives have differing perspectives on abortion. Lastly, frames favored by one side provoked hostile reactions from the other: liberals use more hostile expressions when addressing religion, fetal personhood, and exceptions to abortion bans, whereas conservatives use more hostile language when addressing bodily autonomy and women's health. This signals disrespect and derogation, which may further preclude understanding and exacerbate polarization.