“It’s never about #ProLife, it’s about punishment, hate, and religious repression”. Polarising discourses and disinformation in the abortion debate on Twitter

The spread of disinformation and hate speech about abortion on social media platforms has been triggered by recent normative developments that have led to increased discussions. The aim of this chapter is to automatically identify: (a) disinformation based on content correctness vs. fake news and (b) polarisation of attitudes based on discourse labels. However, when attempting to instruct an AI to detect disinformation related to the abortion debate on Twitter in a period from 1 January 2022 to 31 December 2022, it was found that the instruction could never be objective due to an ideological bias of the researchers. Nevertheless, expressions of hate speech can be found in the context of vilification: The preliminary results show that the more polarised the discourse, the more the group is misrepresented.