Abstract
This research brief presents analyses aimed at characterizing the content of a corpus of original and retweeted Twitter posts related to the role of alcohol intoxication in sexual assault within the context of the #MeToo movement. A text-mining approach was used to collect 25,014 tweets and retweets containing #MeToo and keywords involving alcohol intoxication posted during the year after #MeToo went viral (October 15, 2017 to October 15, 2018). A combination of algorithm-driven cluster analysis and manual qualitative analysis was used to discover the most prominent themes. Analyses revealed that the content of tweets related to alcohol use and #MeToo were overwhelmingly centered around U.S.politics. Analysis of a subsample of 5,566 original (i.e., non-retweeted) tweets revealed fewer politically-focused topics and a noteworthy theme expressing concern for men in the #MeToo era. Findings are discussed in relation to political discourse on social media, the use of #MeToo to express political ideologies, and implications for supporting sexual assault survivors.
Acknowledgement
The authors acknowledge that this research is unfunded and declare no conflicts of interest.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).