puthuveetilnp / reprorepo

An R Shiny web application to help people evaluate whether or not the reproductive health information they find online is credible using a website analysis tool and visualizations.

ReproRepo

The primary inspiration for ReproRepo was a series of pieces by John Oliver on Crisis Pregnancy Centers and Sexual Education from his show Last Week Tonight. In these pieces, he detailed the extremely deliberate and sophisticated techniques used by anti-abortion groups and groups against sex education in order to push their own agenda onto people who seek reproductive help. Masquerading as credible sources, these groups use intentionally ambiguous language to hide their true intentions until they have the person in their clinic, where they can further pressure or misinform them into making decisions that they would not have made if they had truly credible counsel. The tactics and language used by these groups can be difficult for the untrained eye to catch. Further exacerbating the problem is the fact that these groups can often outnumber credible services! Knowing these facts, we began thinking: Can we create an application that not only links users to credible sources but also helps them evaluate if a given source is fake?

ReproRepo is a web application that allows users to input the URL of a given sexual health resource and will then analyze that resource by comparing it to known fake/real resources. The user will receive the output of the analysis, including whether the resource was most likely fake/credible, which words/phrases on the site are potentially dubious, and what fake/real resources their inputted URL matched most to. In addition to this, users can access the visualizations related to the density of fake crisis pregnancy centers in their states and other resources.