Aria Pessianzadeh

Aria Pessianzadeh, Alex H. Poole, Rezvaneh Rezapour

The 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization reshaped the reproductive rights landscape, introducing new uncertainty and barriers to abortion access. We present a large-scale computational analysis of abortion discourse on Reddit, examining how barriers to access are articulated across information-seeking and information-sharing behaviors, different stages of abortion (before, during, after), and three phases of the Dobbs decision in 2022. Drawing on more than 17,000 posts from four abortion-related subreddits, we employed a multi-step pipeline to classify posts by information type, abortion stage, barrier category, and expressed emotions. Using a codebook of eight barrier types, including legal, financial, emotional, and social obstacles, we analyzed their associations with emotions and information behaviors. Topic modeling of model-generated barrier rationales further revealed how discourse evolved in response to shifting legal and cultural contexts. Our findings show that emotional and psychological barriers consistently dominate abortion narratives online, with emotions such as nervousness, confusion, fear, and sadness prevalent across discourse. By linking information behaviors, barriers, emotions, and temporal dynamics, this study provides a multi-dimensional account of how abortion is navigated in online communities.

Aria Pessianzadeh, Naima Sultana, Hildegarde Van den Bulck et al.

The rise of generative AI (GenAI) has impacted many aspects of human life. As these systems become embedded in everyday practices, understanding public trust in them also becomes essential for responsible adoption and governance. Prior work on trust in AI has largely drawn from psychology and human-computer interaction, but there is a lack of computational, large-scale, and longitudinal approaches to measuring trust and distrust in GenAI and large language models (LLMs). This paper presents the first computational study of Trust and Distrust in GenAI, using a multi-year Reddit dataset (2022--2025) spanning 39 subreddits and 197,618 posts. Crowd-sourced annotations of a representative sample were combined with classification models to scale analysis. We find that Trust and Distrust are nearly balanced over time, with shifts around major model releases. Technical performance and usability dominate as dimensions, while personal experience is the most frequent reason shaping attitudes. Distinct patterns also emerge across trustors (e.g., experts, ethicists, general users). Our results provide a methodological framework for large-scale Trust analysis and insights into evolving public perceptions of GenAI.