Abstract
Online social media movements are now common and support cultural discussions on difficult health and social topics. The #MeToo movement, focusing on the pervasiveness of sexual assault and harassment, has been one of the largest and most influential online movements. Our study examines topics of conversation on Twitter by supporters of the #MeToo movement and by Twitter users who were uninvolved in the movement to explore the extent to which tweet topics for these two groups converge over time. We identify and collect one year’s worth of tweets for supporters of the #MeToo movement (N = 168 users; N = 105,538 tweets) and users not involved in the movement (N = 147 users; N = 112,301 tweets referred to as the Neutral Sample). We conduct topic frequency analysis and implement an unsupervised machine learning topic modeling algorithm, latent Dirichlet allocation, to explore topics of discussion on Twitter for these two groups of users before and after the initial #MeToo movement. Our results suggest that supporters of #MeToo discussed different topics compared to the Neutral Sample of Twitter users before #MeToo with some overlap on politics. The supporters were already discussing sexual assault and harassment issues six months before #MeToo, and discussion on this topic increased 13.7-fold in the six months after. For the Neutral Sample, sexual assault and harassment was not a key topic of discussion on Twitter before #MeToo, but there was some limited increase afterward. Results of bigram frequency analysis and topic modeling showed a clear increase in topic related to gender for the supporters of #MeToo but gave mixed results for the Neutral Sample comparison group. Our results suggest limited shifts in the conversation on Twitter for the Neutral Sample. Our methods and results have implications for measuring the extent to which online social media movements, like #MeToo, reach a broad audience.
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