Decriminalizing same-sex relationships and its impact on social media discussions in Asia
2026-06-10
While legal reforms may coincide with shifts in public discourse, broader normative change often remains uneven and context dependent. Since 2018, four Asian countries—India, Taiwan, Thailand and Singapore—have decriminalized same-sex relationships, providing an opportunity to examine how such institutional changes are associated with public discussions of LGBTQ+ topics. Here, using supervised and unsupervised natural language processing methods, we analysed 136,255 Facebook news posts and 65,969 public Instagram captions within a 100-day window before and after each reform. To contextualize online discourse with offline sentiment, we incorporated nationally representative survey data from the Gallup World Poll ( N = 46,200). Following decriminalization, online discussions were characterized by reduced moralized and affectively negative language, particularly in contexts with greater freedom of expression. By contrast, offline perceptions of neighbourhood safety for same-sex couples shifted more modestly and unevenly across age groups and countries.