Post-Abortion Syndrome and Visual Post-Truth on X: Images, Polarization and Affective Responses in the Spanish Political Debate

Abstract

In September 2025, a VOX motion approved by the Partido Popular in Madrid's municipal plenary made information about the so-called post-abortion syndrome mandatory, a clinical construct unrecognised in the reference diagnostic manuals. This article examines the visual and discursive ecology that formed on X around that initiative. The corpus comprises 70,589 Spanish-language posts collected between 30 September 2025 and 25 January 2026; from it we derive four image-bearing institutional posts by PSOE Madrid and the VOX Municipal Group, together with 339 replies, 51 of which contain images. The analysis applies the Social Argumentative Analysis Framework, coding argumentative status, argumentative schemes, fallacies, emotive language and legitimation repertoires, supplemented by two dimensions developed for this case: the degree to which a reply anchors onto the trigger's proposition, the object whose content users interpret and describe in the comments. Results show that two thirds of replies do not engage what the post actually claims. The displacement is associated to the typographic hierarchy of the visual material and is asymmetrically distributed: in the comments’ layer the target shifts from the partisan adversary to the woman who aborts, and the demographic replacement narrative circulates mainly through images. No evidence of coordination was found based on the indicators examined.