Trust Lab Releases Report Assessing Abortion Misinformation

Claim that abortion is never medically necessary to save a woman's life increased 1800 percent after Roe v. Wade overturned

PALO ALTO, Calif., Nov. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Trust Lab, the company dedicated to creating a safer Internet using ML-powered Trust & Safety tools, today shared a report advancing quantitative measurement of abortion misinformation to properly assess the potential for harm.

Among the key findings in June compared to May:

• Not surprisingly, abortion misinformation and discourse became much more prevalent after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
• Misinformation about health had the second largest upward trend, up nearly 300 percent, just behind misinformation about abortion and the Supreme Court of the United States.
• The specific claim that abortion is never medically necessary to save a woman's life trended up 1800 percent.

"While abortion is often viewed as a political issue with deep conviction across the political spectrum, the risk of abortion misinformation's harm to users is distinct and warrants action," said Tom Siegel, Trust Lab Co-Founder and CEO. "The findings in this Trust Lab report provide a springboard for the Trust and Safety community to approach abortion misinformation quantitatively, helping to identify and respond to the most viral and high-harm claims."

Trust Lab's researchers conducted a systematic search across social media platforms and uncovered more than 35 unique misinformation claims in fact-check articles by third party fact-check organizations and news entities.

The researchers also tagged posts across the major social media platforms, each with one of the following: supporting, opposing, neutral. These tags indicate whether a given post supports, opposes, or is neutrally related to a misinformation claim. To better understand the types of abortion misinformation being proliferated, researchers also tracked categories of claims being made.

This report and others showcasing Trust Lab's misinformation research can be found here.

Trust Lab, the company dedicated to creating a safer Internet, uses ML-based classifiers and rules engines built by Trust & Safety experts from Google, YouTube, Reddit and TikTok to identify and measure high-risk and harmful content, accounts, and transactions at scale. The majority of the leading social media companies, as well as the U.S. Government and the European Union use Trust Lab's innovative tools and services.

SOURCE Trust Lab