#metoo Through the Lens of Social Media

Sexual abuse – a highly stigmatized topic in the society has spurred a revolution in the recent days especially through the shared posts on social media platforms via attaching the hashtag #metoo. Individuals from different backgrounds and ethnicities began sharing on the online venues about their personal experiences of getting sexually assaulted. This paper makes an initial attempt to asses the public reactions and emotions by utilizing the publicly shared #metoo posts by performing a comparative analysis of the tweets shared on Twitter as well as on Reddit. Though nearly equal ratios of negative and positive posts are shared on both platforms, Reddit posts are focused on the sexual assaults within families and workplaces while Twitter posts are on showing empathy and encouraging others to continue the #metoo movement. The data collected in this research helps in the preliminary analysis of the user engagement, discussion topics, word connotations and sentiment with respect to the #metoo movement.

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