Title
Coming to Terms with Online Activism: Defining Impacts of New Social Movements in the Case of #MeToo
Major
Political Science
Second Major
Communication Studies
Advisor
Poulakos, Nikolaos
Advisor Department
Communication Studies
Date
5-2020
Keywords
#MeToo, New Social Movements, Social Media Activism
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Abstract
People have come together in many ways throughout history to create lasting change in society. Previous social movements emerged with the use of protests, marches and other mobilization strategies to gain support for a cause. Today, people increasingly rely on social media to create and sustain movements that will raise awareness and incite change. The primary focus for this project is on the Me Too movement, which went viral in 2017 after several groundbreaking stories uncovered widespread sexual harassment allegations in Hollywood and beyond. The hashtag #MeToo gained immense popularity on social media as people from all over the world pledged solidarity and shared their own experiences of sexual harassment and assault.
This project seeks to determine the impacts that new social movements circulating online have on society. I review relevant social movement literature to outline the defining characteristics of both traditional and new (online) social movements, including how to assess the potential impacts of both. Relying on a collection of newspaper and magazine headlines during peak times of the Me Too movement along with academic journal articles focusing on this time, I use a qualitative approach to analyze and categorize major elements of the Me Too movement. I compare these categories to the forms of other movements, determining what institutional and non-institutional impacts the Me Too movement had on society, and if it should be considered a new social movement. In a final analysis, I explore ways in which Me Too can be classified as a unique instance of a social movement while taking a creative approach to expanding and understanding societal impacts. There are limitations to drawing direct conclusions about the societal impacts of new social movements, which may require alternative approaches to understanding this topic. This project will further contribute to the growing body of literature that exists in the area of social movement studies while creating possibilities for future research of online social movements