Abortion Activists, Worldviews, and Attitude Expression: A Twitter Analysis
Open Access
- Author:
- Przybylinski, Brooke
- Area of Honors:
- Social Data Analytics
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Michael Barth Berkman, Thesis Supervisor
Matthew Richard Golder, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- abortion
twitter
sentiment analysis
activist
abortion activists
abortion activist
social media
twitter scraping
social media politics
attitudes
political attitudes
attitude expression
worldviews
worldview
woman
women
women's rights
gender and politics
pro-life
pro-choice
abortion legality
religion
secular
political sentiment - Abstract:
- Why do activists who support abortion express their attitudes differently than activists who do not? And do these differences in attitude expression translate to modern forms of communication, namely social media? This analysis investigates abortion attitude expression on Twitter, using 2,100 tweets scraped from six different abortion-related activist groups, three pro-life and three pro-choice. Abortion is a morality policy, which has a higher salience among individuals, particularly activists (Mooney 676). Opinions on such morality policies are shaped based on people’s worldviews, which are sets of values that are unchanging and central to their identities (Luker 158). Other studies on abortion attitude expression have shown that these contrasting worldviews motivate pro-life and pro-choice activists to convey their messages differently. This project builds on these studies by determining if social media shows these same discrepancies and therefore serves as evidence for these worldviews. I found that both pro-life and pro-choice tweets were educational when describing their stance. However, pro-life activists used more emotional appeals, negative sentiment, and inflammatory language. Meanwhile, pro-choice tweets use more words when describing their point of view. Clearly, pro-life and pro-choice activists tweet differently. Across organizations that are on the same side of the issue, however, the tweets were similar in terms of these characteristics. These two central findings are evidence for these theoretical explanations of the abortion issue, because activists on different sides of the issue have different worldviews, while activists on the same side have similar worldviews.