When feminism meets social networks

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine how different feminist Facebook groups in Israel operate in order to better understand the main issues in their discussions about feminism in Israel. The study will also identify the variances between the different subgroups. A secondary research question examined was whether Voyant Tools can be used as an effective content text analysis tool in general and in Hebrew in particular.Design/methodology/approachThe study's research method analyzes the content of Facebook posts using the Voyant Tools online toolkit to quantitatively analyze and visualize the results of text mining and data visualization. The sample consists of the texts of posts of three groups representing different currents in Israeli feminism, gathered over a period of three months.FindingsThe results show that there are high-frequency words occurring in all groups, each group has its unique words, which distinguish it from the other groups. Feminist and Halachic Feminist groups had few words in common, while the Religious Feminist groups had more words in common with both the Feminist and the Halachic Feminist groups and more so with the latter group. While all groups discussed the issue of violence against women, especially sexual violence, the degree of engagement varied greatly between the groups. In addition, there were clear differences in the prominent issues concerning the various groups. This paper demonstrates the possibility of using Voyant Tools for text mining and analysis.Originality/valueThis paper demonstrates the possibility of using Voyant Tools for text mining and analysis. Voyant Tools shed light on common concepts, their location and prevalence in the text.