Reddit API
Social Media (Reddit)
Our hope was to analyze the difference in coverage of abortion between mainstream media and social media. One of the social media sources we examined was Reddit. Reddit is specifically useful to analyze because users can submit blog-style posts about current news events. The free version of the Reddit API pulls up to 2,000 post titles. Pulling from the Politics subreddit, we filtered for post titles including the word “abortion.” The number of posts about abortion per day in the subreddit is shown below.
The chart shows a peak in posts on December 16, 2021. This coincides with the date that the US Food and Drug Administration announced that they would permanently allow abortion pills by mail. The news came as the Supreme Court showed signs that it intends to undo its abortion rights precedent. Medication abortion, which uses a two pill process, has become a more common approach for terminating pregnancy. Relaxing federal restrictions surrounding medication abortion is one thing that can help mitigate the fallout from a Roe v. Wade reversal.
We next found the mean polarity and subjectivity of the Reddit post headlines, in an attempt to gauge the communities’ overall sentiments. The polarity of the headlines was slightly positive. The posts had a high subjectivity, which makes sense since it is a personal blog space. The below table shows the results.
| Sentiment Analysis of Reddit Post Headlines | ||
|---|---|---|
| Polarity | 0.021429 | |
| Subjectivity | 0.176190 |
- See the Final Project Code for the code that produced these plots.