The Analysis of #MeToo Social Justice Movement On Twitter Expert Answer
ABSTRACT
The Me Too Movement launched in the winters of 2017 was originated by actress Alyssa Milano who urged the victims of sexual abuse for sharing their stories on social media especially Twitter in wake of the misconduct accused against Harvey Weinstein (Hollywood executive). The #MeToo hash-tag was used roughly around 19 million times on Twitter during 2017-2018 with huge surges around news events. In order to investigate whether the users used #MeToo through original tweets throughout the campaign for sharing their own stories or merely used the #MeToo by sharing the original posts through re-tweeting for extending support to social justice movement against sexual harassment, 4997 tweets were randomly recorded and analyzed. Twitter was selected as the social media platform for this social justice movement because it was the point of emergence of the movement. The results indicated that the engagement through social media interaction is high as people made re-tweets more than tweeting the original posts. It was seen from the analysis that the number of re-tweets consistently dominated the number of original tweets. It can also be seen from the above analysis that the sentiments drove from the #MeToo movement were more positive as compared to negative as the main aim of the movement was to support the victims and empower them for taking actions and speaking up against sexual assault. Another main point identified from the analysis was that people re-tweeted for spreading the information to new audiences as well as for drawing attention to content. In order to build collective group identification and encouraging other users to take social actions, users engaged through re-tweeting using #MeToo. Irrespective of the negative personal experiences being narrated by victims on the particular issue, these platforms also depict the positive hopes given by individuals for bringing a real change in the current society.
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INTRODUCTION
The Me Too Movement launched in the winters of 2017 was originated by actress Alyssa Milano who urged the victims of sexual abuse for sharing their stories on social media especially Twitter in wake of the misconduct accused against Harvey Weinstein (Hollywood executive) (Anderson & Toor, 2018). The “Me Too” phrase was tweeted and re-tweeted more than 200,000 times by the end of 15th October 2017 on Twitter while more than 4.7 million people across the globe made posts using “me too” hash-tag on Facebook in 24 hours after used initially (Manikonda, et al., 2018). The movement caused worldwide social and political unrest as millions of people were accused of sexual harassment including chairman and chief executive of CBS who had to resign amid allegations of sexual misconduct on 9th September, 2018 (Brünker, et al., 2020).
The #MeToo hash-tag was used roughly around 19 million times on Twitter during 2017-2018 with huge surges around news events. This means that on average 55,319 users used #MeToo per day on Twitter for sharing their stories or concerns over sexual harassment (Modrek & Chakalov, 2019). The figure 1 below shows the rise in the number of tweets on 17th October and 6th December during 2017 while the surges were seen on 9th and 27th September in 2018. The movement resulted in resignations of Harvey Weinstein and Leslie Moonves while pushed Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford to testify before Senate during 2017 and 2018 respectively (Brunner & Partlow-Lefevre, 2020).
Similar to other social justice or women empowerment movements based on the notion of “breaking silence”, the purpose of “#MeToo” was to empower the women through showing empathy and solidarity against harassment and sexual assault especially in the workplace (Xiong & Boatwright, 2019). Number of high profile celebrities and politicians around the world got engaged with the movement through their responses and posts on social media. Celebrities like Lady Gaga, Evan Rachel Wood, Debra Messing, Uma Thurman, Jennifer Lawrence, Ashley Judd and Gwyneth Paltrow also responded to sexual harassment and called upon attention towards this important social issue (Bhattacharyya, 2018). Since social media enables the real-time conversation between the active and non-active users, so analyzing the impact of social media on interactive communication during such movement appeared to be an attractive research domain for the current study.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Manikonda et al. (2018) analyzed the role of Reddit and Twitter for sparking the #MeToo movement by obtaining the python APIs used for communication. The data of 621,000 posts from 205,500 Twitter users and 190 posts from 70 Reddit users concluded that Twitter only persuaded the users to share others’ stories for continuing the #MeToo movement instead of sharing their own experiences through social media. However, Reddit appeared to be more interactive as it allowed users to share their own experiences in depth with others. However, the study emphasized on the role of Twitter for acting as a starting point for social law-making and social-justice movements like Me Too.
Brunker et al. (2020) also analyzed the role of social media for igniting the social movement that can bring social changes on issues like sexual harassment and discrimination. The study collected 960,000 tweets of the 609,170 accounts during 2017 from Twitter using MySQL database and Search API. The results indicated that the tweets were mostly posted by journalists (20.5%) followed by private persons (20.5%), celebrities (18.5%) and media organizations (13%). Surprisingly, the study revealed that the activists, politicians and NGOS contributed way less in the debate on #MeToo on twitter as compared to social bots, celebrities and journalists.
Xiong et al. (2019) also conducted the research for understanding the effects of social media for furthering the social movements. The research revealed the use of new phrase of “social media activism” by indicating that now social media is being used for attracting political engagement in furtherance of social movements. The social activism movements like #MeToo used online networks like Twitter Hastags for helping the activists organize and share the information in order to push for freer expression and propel the political change. The similar movements including #BlackLivesMatter also thrived with over 30 million Twitter posts while helping the activists to galvanize activism about racial bias, criminal justice system and enforcement reform.
In light of the above discussion, the current study will be based on analyzing the number of tweets and re-tweets using #MeToo on Twitter. The aim is to understand whether people responded to the social justice movement in order to share their own story or whether they only retweeted the original tweets for sharing the support to the social justice movement. As it is believed that liking, sharing or even re-tweeting the post can represent the initial step toward greater engagement by individuals on social media, hence every action of the sample tweets/retweets will be considered for analyzing the role of Twitter in furthering the social movement like #MeToo (Jaffe, 2018).
RQ1: Were the users posting original stories as tweets using #MeToo or were they shraring through retweets for igniting the social justice movement of #MeToo.
RQ2: Is the language on #MeToo tweets and retweets more positive or negative?
METHODS
In order to investigate whether the users used #MeToo through original tweets throughout the campaign for sharing their own stories or merely used the #MeToo by sharing the original posts through re-tweeting for extending support to social justice movement against sexual harassment, 4997 tweets were randomly recorded and analyzed. The database was categorized under four main themes i.e. original post (tweet) in positive and negative languages and shared post (re-tweet) in positive and negative languages (see appendix 1 for screenshots). These themes provided the code for this analysis and were labeled in the following way.
Tweeted = T1. Tweeted for sharing Own Story in Positive Language
T2. Tweeted for sharing Own Story in Negative Language
Re-Tweeted= R1. Retweeted for Igniting the Movement in Positive Language
R2. Retweeted for Igniting the Movement in Negative Language
Twitter was selected as the social media platform for this social justice movement because it was the point of emergence where American Actress Alyssa Milano first opened the conversation to allow all victims for discussing the violence and sexual harassment issues faced in workplace. After the first post, the news regarding the viral hashtag became prevalent quickly while several news channels began reporting on #MeToo extensively (Rho, et al., 2018). The sample of 4997 #MeToo Tweets were analyzed using the database of tweets for November 27th, 2017.
RESULTS
By using the captured tweets between the chosen timeline, the following analysis has been made.
| No. of Occurrences | Total Tweets/Re-Tweets | |
| T1 Positively Tweeted | 1292 | 2021 |
| T2 Negatively Tweeted | 729 | |
| R1 Positively Re-Tweeted | 2146 | 2979 |
| R2 Negatively Re-Tweeted | 833 |
Table 1: Data Categorization
Graph 1: Trends of Tweets/Re-Tweets
The results indicated that the engagement through social media interaction is high as people made re-tweets more than tweeting the original posts. It was seen from the analysis that the number of re-tweets consistently dominated the number of original tweets. The results aided in analyzing the unprecedented social reach and impact of the social media on social justice movement like #MeToo. The high number of re-tweets of the original post highlighted that the people engaged more with the movement by extending support through re-tweeting the original post instead of sharing their own experiences. Through the analysis, it was also seen that the posts from highly followed users like activists, bloggers or celebrities were more likely to be re-tweeted on the chosen day.
It can also be seen from the above analysis that the sentiments drove from the #MeToo movement were more positive as compared to negative. Moreover, the sentiments also included trust, anger, fear, anticipation and sadness related comments. The results show that most of the tweets used positive language as the main aim of the movement was to support the victims and empower them for taking actions and speaking up against sexual assault. The words like female, humanity, culture, solution and pretty represented the positive comments from the followers of most re-tweeted posts. While, the negative comments included fake, black, abuse, rape, problem and slave words.
Upon deeply analyzing the content of most re-tweeted posts, it was seen that the use of emotional and affective language in the original post made it most attractive and pushed the users to re-tweet the original post instead of sharing their own experiences. Moreover, on such social justice issue, the negative emotions and experiences drove most feedback from others and caught attention as well as the cognitive involvement. Through the analysis, it was also seen that the tendency of language and emotions can urge the users to interact more by re-tweeting the content on social media. Another main point identified from the analysis was that people re-tweeted for spreading the information to new audiences as well as for drawing attention to content. In order to build collective group identification and encouraging other users to take social actions, users engaged through re-tweeting using #MeToo.
DISCUSSION
In a world where workplace harassment and sexual abuse have become apparent, the online dialogues through online platforms have become a powerful tool. This particular movement fixed spotlight on the magnitude of sexual harassment while raising the awareness about advancing human rights. The genesis of the current research was to answer the simple question i.e. can social media become a vehicle for fostering the social change and allow people ignite the social justice movement so that traditional views on such issues could be changed?
The results of the data analysis indicated that on average each #MeToo post collected more than 7.28 likes with re-tweets of more than 3.3 times. It was also seen that the local hashtags during the chosen day collected significantly higher engagement. The results of the study were in line with Brunner & Sarah (2020), Caputli et al. (2019), Xiong et al. (2019) and Manikonda et al. (2018). All of these studies concluded that social media especially Twitter played an extensive role in igniting the social justice movement by encouraging people to engage through tweeting and re-tweeting. The movement was a success as each user’s feed was filled up with tweets and re-tweets. Moreover, people sharing stories through re-tweeting showed how people developed trusted networks and engaged with the victims using social media that ultimately became the success of the overall movement. This was the reason for #MeToo silence breakers to be nominated as the “Person of Year” by Time Magazine. The portrayal of several women on the magazine cover showed the collective and joint efforts exhibited by the users of social media reveal the success of social engagement stirred on Twitter during the movement timeperiod.
CONCLUSION
The #MeToo movement has successfully managed to overcome some of the main barriers for addressing sexual harassment using social media. Fueled up by the configuration of different networks and launched by the hyperpublic social media networking, the #MeToo movement revealed pervasive harassment and abuse faced by victims at workplace. Despite of the limitation given in the study i.e. inability to consider all posts due to limited time and funds, the current study highlights the magnitude of mass sharing of the personal experiences of sexual harassment using social media. Further, the tweets presented the rich detail on sentiments that provide the analysis on how users engaged with the original posts. The revealing statements reminded the users of the social media to understand the magnitude of the sexual violence and revealed how people can engage with others for driving a collective social movement using social media. In a nutshell, it can be said that social media enables the individuals for recognizing the importance of stigmatized issues and enables them to share their personal stories as well as pursue other users stories for igniting the social justice movements like #MeToo. Irrespective of the negative personal experiences being narrated by victims on the particular issue, these platforms also depict the positive hopes given by individuals for bringing a real change in the current society.
REFERENCES
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