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International Conference on Social Informatics

SocInfo 2020: Social Informatics pp 67–80Cite as

Understanding the MeToo Movement Through the Lens of the Twitter

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12467))

Abstract

In recent years, social media has provided platforms for raising the voice against sexual harassment (SH). The MeToo movement is one such online movement that aims to show the magnitude of this stigmatized issue in society. In particular, on Twitter, which is the focus of this study, has attracted a large number of tweets from all over the world regarding the MeToo movement. The studies of the MeToo movement focus on the SH and sexual assault (SA) incidents but fails to analyze its other hidden facets. In this work, we perform micro-analysis of the MeToo movement using tweets and present a descriptive analysis coupled with macro level tweets analysis in order to reveal and understand the diverse subtopics of the MeToo movement. In addition, we also identify and characterize varied user-groups derived through social network analysis. We find that users discussing a similar facet forms a strong community. Some of the facets out of many being discovered are as follows (1) SH incidents reporting is high for people of color (color means other than white); (2) discussion over color often leads to the use of hate and offensive vocabulary; and (3) along with workplaces, domestic SH cases are higher.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Color means other than white.

  2. 2.

    http://twitter.com.

  3. 3.

    https://www.tumblr.com/.

  4. 4.

    https://foursquare.com/.

  5. 5.

    http://plus.google.com.

  6. 6.

    http://linkedin.com/.

  7. 7.

    https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/10/26/twitter-overcounted-active-users-since-2014-shares-surge/801968001/.

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by ERDF via the IT Academy Research Programme and H2020 project, SoBigData++. We would like to thanks Nishkal Prakash for the data collection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Rahul Goel & Rajesh Sharma

Authors
  1. Rahul Goel
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  2. Rajesh Sharma
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rahul Goel .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany

    Samin Aref

  2. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Kalina Bontcheva

  3. King’s College London, London, UK

    Marco Braghieri

  4. Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Frank Dignum

  5. ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy

    Fosca Giannotti

  6. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Francesco Grisolia

  7. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Dino Pedreschi

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Goel, R., Sharma, R. (2020). Understanding the MeToo Movement Through the Lens of the Twitter. In: Aref, S., et al. Social Informatics. SocInfo 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12467. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60975-7_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60975-7_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-60974-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-60975-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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