Reclaiming Stigmatized Narratives: The Networked Disclosure Landscape of #MeToo

Abstract

The social stigma looming over disclosures of sexual violence discourages many women from publicly sharing their stories, limiting their ability to seek support and obscuring the epidemic of sexual violence against women. By inviting women to share their ordinarily silenced stories, the hashtag #MeToo surfaced a network of survivors to confront this stigma. Through a mixed-methods analysis of over 1.5 million tweets posted during the first two weeks after #MeToo gained widespread popularity in 2017, we map the landscape of disclosures that emerged and disentangle the effects of network-level reciprocal disclosures, or disclosures made in reaction to seeing others disclose. We detail how survivors disclosed a diversity of sexual violence experiences in solidarity with others, composing nearly half of all authored tweets and comprising a disproportionate number of interactions within the #MeToo network. Further, we show that the more disclosures an individual potentially saw prior to disclosing, the more likely they were to share details with their disclosure. We argue that such network-level reciprocal disclosures may have reduced stigma, creating a counterpublic space safe for disclosure which, subsequently, generated more disclosures. Our work illustrates how feminist hashtag activism, like #MeToo, can unify individual and collective narratives to dismantle the stigma surrounding disclosures of sexual violence. Content warning: This article heavily discusses issues of sexual violence against women.

#MeToo, #MeThree, #MeFour: Twitter as community building across academic and corporate institutions

“…Following the rise of the Me Too hashtag, users also began tweeting @TaranaBurke and @womensmarch, indicating Twitter users’ emphases on activist and founder Tarana Burke, and linking her to taking action through the Women's March (Sturgess & Burns, 2018). The Twitter landscape allows survivors to disclose their experiences and network with other survivors through hashtags (Gallagher et al, 2019).…”

A clarified typology of core-periphery structure in networks

“…Social media are notable for creating spaces where historically disenfranchised individuals can come together and share their stories at an unprecedented scale ( 34 – 36 ). Hashtag activism, in particular, has been a critical vehicle for driving those marginalized voices into the mainstream public sphere ( 35 , 36 ), as exemplified by hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo ( 35 , 37 ). The amplification of those voices is a fundamentally networked process; the core consists of those who are most visible exactly because many peripheral amplifiers share the core’s posts through emergent crowdsourcing ( 1 ).…”

“…Although those at the periphery of hashtag activism events are sometimes derided as “slacktivists,” Barberá et al ( 1 ) demonstrated that the periphery contributes significantly to the amplification of core protest voices. We perform a similar analysis on the retweet network of the hashtag #MeToo, a hashtag that highlighted the pervasiveness of sexual violence against women by creating a space for them to publicly disclose their experiences ( 35 , 37 ). We fit hub-and-spoke and layered core-periphery models to the #MeToo network and calculate the coreness of each individual according to each model.…”

“…For the hashtag activism case study, we consider all of the tweets containing the hashtag #MeToo that were posted 12 hours after actress Alyssa Milano’s “me too” tweet, which catalyzed the hashtag campaign on 15 October 2017 [see ( 37 ) for further data details]. The use of human-generated data gathered from Twitter was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board at Northeastern University.…”

How Content Authored by People with Dementia Affects Attitudes towards Dementia

“…We seek to make two contributions to CSCW research with the present study. First, content produced by people discussing stigmatized experiences is frequently studied to identify priorities [1,32], and is already seen as a lever for intervening in prevailing social attitudes, such as in studies of disability-related online advocacy [2,67] -however, little is known about how this content afects audiences. Our research contributes an empirical investigation of the efect of content generated by a stigmatized group, people with dementia, over a period of two weeks.…”