Roe v Wade in twitter: Sentiment analysis with machine learning

The abortion policy has been a controversial topic in the United States for a long time. The recent reversal of the Roe v Wade decision has sparked a renewed national debate on this issue. With the prevalence of social media, it has become easier than ever to gather data on public opinions and attitudes towards healthcare policies, including abortion. This research aims to analyze the sentiment of tweets about US abortion policy using machine learning techniques. To accomplish this objective, a random sample of publicly available tweets from January 2021 to October 2022 was collected. The tweets were filtered based on relevant hashtags related to abortion and the Roe v Wade ruling. The dataset consisted of more than 450,000 tweets, which were then subjected to automated sentiment scoring using a lexicon-based approach. By employing BERT and deep learning, the study achieved an accuracy of 78.6% in predicting tweet sentiment. The findings from this research can provide valuable insights for policymakers and stakeholders in the healthcare industry, helping them comprehend public sentiment towards abortion policy and develop effective communication strategies.