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#MeToo, #MeThree, #MeFour: Twitter as community building across academic and corporate institutions
Author(s) -
Kachen Axenya,
Krishen Anjala S.,
Petrescu Maria,
Gill Rebecca D.,
Peter Paula C.
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
psychology and marketing
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.035
H-Index - 116
eISSN - 1520-6793
pISSN - 0742-6046
DOI - 10.1002/mar.21442
Subject(s) - harassment , social media , psychology , social psychology , power (physics) , sociology , public relations , political science , law , physics , quantum mechanics
This netnography‐based inquiry of the #MeToo movement on Twitter recognizes the relationships between organizations and individuals in varying levels of power and how social media can mitigate power dynamics in reporting systems for sexual harassment and assault. We study both academia and corporations as cultural institutions within which sexual harassment survivors are historically disenfranchised and convinced not to voice their stories. Distinct elements of these structures create differences in how vulnerable individuals face persecution. This paper explores the relationships between university and corporate contexts within the ecological framework of harassment. Our multidisciplinary study contributes to existing literature by extracting two samples of tweets ( n = 1248 university and n = 1290 corporate) with three different unguided analytic tools to explore their semantic meaning, valence and emotionality, and overall sentiment. Drawing from our findings and literature review, we discuss the history of #MeToo as an amplification tool; Twitter as a social movement mechanism; and the roles of power, retaliation, and risk across institutions in relation to survivors of sexual violence and harassment.