Decriminalizing same-sex relationships and its impact on social media discussions in Asia

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.