Abstract

The “Me Too” movement, founded by activist Tarana Burke, began in 2006, before Twitter became the viral platform for political activism and news media that it is known for today. The reemergence of the Me Too movement on Twitter in 2017 sparked a widespread focus on the societal issue of sexual misconduct. This study examines sexual assault disclosures as an aspect of such misconduct through the context of the Me Too movement on Twitter. Through the use of content analysis, online disclosures of sexual assault ( N = 1,459) are examined for variations of sexual explicitness and attainment of social functions per the functional theory of self-disclosure. Specifically, this study explores associations between Twitter network structure and (1) levels of sexual explicitness and (2) retweet count. Through manual coding and statistical analysis, the study finds associations between sexual explicitness of online disclosures and retweet count as well as associations between network structure and sexual explicitness of disclosures. The study shifts the focus of disclosure discourse from dyadic communication to the contemporary context of networked social media. Implications for theory and practice are discussed, which include, but are not limited to, the exploration of associations between disclosing and catharsis, disclosing that may be characterized as neutral or conflicted, and disclosing sexual assault without being sexually explicit.

Highlights

  • The “Me Too” movement was founded in 2006 by social activist Tarana Burke (Xiong et al, 2019), who sought to bring awareness to the issue of sexual assault experienced by women of color (Burke, 2017)

  • This study examined the relationship between functional self-disclosure and disclosures of experiences of sexual assault on Twitter

  • The study examined the social affordances sought by Twitter users who disclose their experiences with sexual assault online as well as the association between the sexual explicitness of these disclosures, network size, and the retweet feature

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Summary

Introduction

The “Me Too” movement was founded in 2006 by social activist Tarana Burke (Xiong et al, 2019), who sought to bring awareness to the issue of sexual assault experienced by women of color (Burke, 2017). Over a decade after Burke founded the Me Too movement, it was popularized in social media by a post from Alyssa Milano in 2017 (Kearl, 2018) after news broke of the sexual misconduct allegations against Harvey Weinstein in October 2017. Those events marked an inflection point in the prevalence of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and sexual victimization topics in social media and contributed significantly to the widespread #MeToo movement (Starkey et al, 2019). Many communicative behaviors are enacted online, which is why it is imperative that behavior on social media platforms, as it relates to societal problems such as sexual misconduct, should be integrated into theoretical frameworks and future communication research

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