This study investigates whether division on political topics is mapped with the distinctive patterns of language use. We collect a total 145,832 Reddit comments on the abortion debate and explore the languages of subreddit communities r/prolife and r/prochoice. With consideration of the Moral Foundations Theory, we examine lexical patterns in three ways. First, we compute proportional frequencies of lexical items from the Moral Foundations Dictionary in order to make inferences about each group's moral considerations when forming arguments for and against abortion. We then create n-gram models to reveal frequent collocations from each stance group and better understand how commonly used words are patterned in their linguistic context and in relation to morality values. Finally, we use Latent Dirichlet Allocation to identify underlying topical structures in the corpus data. Results show that the use of morality words is mapped with the stances on abortion.

Social media has played an important role since its emergence. People use the internet to express opinions about anything, making social media platforms a social sensor. Initially supported by Twitter, the hashtags are now in use on several social media platforms. Hashtags are helpful to tag, track, and group posts on similar topics. In this paper, we analyze hashtag drifts over time using concepts from graph analysis and textual data streams using the Girvan-Newman method to uncover hashtag communities in annual snapshots. More specifically, we analyzed the #mybodymychoice hashtag between 2018 and 2022. In addition, we offer insights about some hashtags found in the study. Furthermore, our approach can be useful for monitoring changes over time in opinions and sentiment patterns about an entity on social media. Even though the hashtag #mybodymychoice was initially coupled with women's rights, abortion, and bodily autonomy, we observe that it suffered drifts during the studied period across topics such as drug legalization, vaccination, political protests, war, and civil rights. The year 2021 was the most significant drifting year, in which the communities detected suggest that #mybodymychoice significantly drifted to vaccination and Covid-19-related topics.