Abortion pill marketing and sourcing on twitter following Dobbs v. Jackson supreme court ruling.

OBJECTIVE: This study examines abortion-related discourse on Twitter (X) pre-and post-Dobbs v. Jackson ruling, which eliminated the constitutional right to abortion. STUDY DESIGN: We used a custom data collection tool to collect tweets directly from Twitter using abortion-related keywords. We used the BERTopic language model and examined the top 30 retweeted and top 30 textually similar tweets from relevant topic clusters using an inductive coding approach. We also conducted statistical testing to assess potential associations between abortion themes. RESULTS: 166,799 unique tweets were collected from December 2020-December 2022. 464 unique tweets were coded for abortion-related themes with 154 identified as relevant. Of these, 66 tweets marketed abortion pills, 17 tweets were identified as offering consultations, and 91 tweets were relevant to self-managed abortion. All marketing and consultation tweets were posted post-Dobbs decision and 7 (7.69%) of self-managed tweets were posted pre-Dobbs versus 84 (92.30%) posted post-Dobbs. A positive association was found between tweets offering a medical consultation with tweets marketing abortion pills and discussing self-managed abortion. CONCLUSION: This study detected online marketing of abortion pills, consultations and discussions about self-managed abortion following the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling. These results provide more context to the type of abortion-related information that is available online.

This study examined tweets occurring both pre and post Dobbs decision and identified relevant discussions about self-managed abortion services, marketing and sale of abortion pills, and offering purported medical consultations. These findings indicate that abortion-related tweets, particularly those marketing abortion medications, increased after the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling. These findings highlight the evolving abortion information environment in the United States on Twitter, which represents a platform where health and politicised issues are commonly discussed.

The Influence of News Consumption Habits and Dispositional Traits on Trust in Medical Scientists.

Public trust in medical institutions is essential for ensuring compliance with medical directives. However, the politicization of public health issues and the polarized nature of major news outlets suggest that partisanship and news consumption habits can influence medical trust. This study employed a survey with 858 participants and used regression analysis to assesses how news consumption habits and information assessment traits (IATs) influence trust in medical scientists. IATs included were conscientiousness, openness, need for cognitive closure (NFCC), and cognitive reflective thinking (CRT). News sources were classified on the basis of factuality and political bias. Initially, readership of liberally biased news was positively associated with medical trust (p < 0.05). However, this association disappeared when controlling for the news source's factuality (p = 0.28), while CRT (p < 0.05) was positively associated with medical trust. When controlling for conservatively biased news sources, factuality of the news source (p < 0.05) and NFCC (p < 0.05) were positively associated with medical trust. While partisan media bias may influence medical trust, these results suggest that those who have higher abilities to assess information and who prefer more credible news sources have a greater trust in medical scientists.

Chronic pain patients low in social connectedness report higher pain and need deeper pressure for pain relief.

The experience of rejection and disconnection reliably amplifies pain. Yet, little is known about the impact of enduring feelings of closeness, or social connectedness, on experiences of chronic pain. The current secondary analysis tested the hypothesis that greater social connectedness would predict lower chronic pain ratings, mediated by lower depression and anxiety. In addition, based on the social-affective effects of deeper pressure, and our previous finding that deeper pressure from a weighted blanket reduced chronic pain ratings, we examined whether deeper pressure from a weighted blanket would induce greater pain relief in socially disconnected chronic pain patients. We assessed social connectedness, anxiety, and depression at baseline and pain levels before and after a remote, 7-day randomized-controlled trial of a heavy or light (control) weighted blanket in a predominately White (86%) and female (80%) sample of 95 chronic pain patients. Results revealed that lower social connectedness was associated with higher chronic pain ratings, which was mediated by anxiety, but not depression. Pressure level (light vs. deep) moderated associations between social connectedness and pain reductions, such that deeper pressure was necessary for pain relief in the most socially disconnected participants. Our findings suggest a close relationship between social connectedness and chronic pain through a mechanistic pathway of anxiety. Furthermore, our findings demonstrate that sensory-affective interventions such as a weighted blanket may be a beneficial tool for chronic pain sufferers who are prone to social disconnection, potentially by activating embodied representations of safety and social support. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Spread of COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation in the Ninth Inning: Retrospective Observational Infodemic Study.

Background: Shortly after Pfizer and Moderna received emergency use authorizations from the Food and Drug Administration, there were increased reports of COVID-19 vaccine-related deaths in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). In January 2021, Major League Baseball legend and Hall of Famer, Hank Aaron, passed away at the age of 86 years from natural causes, just 2 weeks after he received the COVID-19 vaccine. Antivaccination groups attempted to link his death to the Moderna vaccine, similar to other attempts misrepresenting data from the VAERS to spread COVID-19 misinformation. Objective: This study assessed the spread of misinformation linked to erroneous claims about Hank Aaron's death on Twitter and then characterized different vaccine misinformation and hesitancy themes generated from users who interacted with this misinformation discourse. Methods: An initial sample of tweets from January 31, 2021, to February 6, 2021, was queried from the Twitter Search Application Programming Interface using the keywords "Hank Aaron" and "vaccine." The sample was manually annotated for misinformation, reporting or news media, and public reaction. Nonmedia user accounts were also classified if they were verified by Twitter. A second sample of tweets, representing direct comments or retweets to misinformation-labeled content, was also collected. User sentiment toward misinformation, positive (agree) or negative (disagree), was recorded. The Strategic Advisory Group of Experts Vaccine Hesitancy Matrix from the World Health Organization was used to code the second sample of tweets for factors influencing vaccine confidence. Results: A total of 436 tweets were initially sampled from the Twitter Search Application Programming Interface. Misinformation was the most prominent content type (n=244, 56%) detected, followed by public reaction (n=122, 28%) and media reporting (n=69, 16%). No misinformation-related content reviewed was labeled as misleading by Twitter at the time of the study. An additional 1243 comments on misinformation-labeled tweets from 973 unique users were also collected, with 779 comments deemed relevant to study aims. Most of these comments expressed positive sentiment (n=612, 78.6%) to misinformation and did not refute it. Based on the World Health Organization Strategic Advisory Group of Experts framework, the most common vaccine hesitancy theme was individual or group influences (n=508, 65%), followed by vaccine or vaccination-specific influences (n=110, 14%) and contextual influences (n=93, 12%). Common misinformation themes observed included linking the death of Hank Aaron to "suspicious" elderly deaths following vaccination, claims about vaccines being used for depopulation, death panels, federal officials targeting Black Americans, and misinterpretation of VAERS reports. Four users engaging with or posting misinformation were verified on Twitter at the time of data collection. Conclusions: Our study found that the death of a high-profile ethnic minority celebrity led to the spread of misinformation on Twitter. This misinformation directly challenged the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines at a time when ensuring vaccine coverage among minority populations was paramount. Misinformation targeted at minority groups and echoed by other verified Twitter users has the potential to generate unwarranted vaccine hesitancy at the expense of people such as Hank Aaron who sought to promote public health and community immunity.

Digital Surveillance to Identify California Alternative and Emerging Tobacco Industry Policy Influence and Mobilization on Facebook.

Growing popularity of electronic nicotine-delivery systems (ENDS) has coincided with a need to strengthen tobacco-control policy. In response, the ENDS industry has taken actions to mobilize against public health measures, including coordination on social media platforms. To explore this phenomenon, data mining was used to collect public posts on two Facebook public group pages: the California Consumer Advocates for Smoke Free Alternatives Association (CCASAA) and the community page of the Northern California Chapter of SFATA (NC-SFATA). Posts were manually annotated to characterize themes associated with industry political interference and user interaction. We collected 288 posts from the NC-SFATA and 411 posts from CCASAA. A total of 522 (74.7%) posts were categorized as a form of political interference, with 339 posts (64.9%) from CCASAA and 183 posts (35.1%) from NC-SFATA. We identified three different categories of policy interference-related posts: (1) providing updates on ENDS-related policy at the federal, state, and local levels; (2) sharing opinions about ENDS-related policies; (3) posts related to scientific information related to vaping; and (4) calls to action to mobilize against tobacco/ENDS policies. Our findings indicate that pro-tobacco social media communities on Facebook, driven by strategic activities of trade associations and their members, may act as focal points for anti-policy information dissemination, grass-roots mobilization, and industry coordination that needs further research.