metoo Archives - Grady College

Xuerong Lu (PhD Alum), Yen-I Lee (PhD Alum), and Yan Jin. (Forthcoming). “Understanding crisis narratives with large-scale Twitter data: The role of celebrity and emotions in the virality of #MeToo social media activism messages.” Narratives in Public Communication (Eds: Fuyuan Shen and Heidi Hatfield Edwards). Routledge.

Abstract: This study, grounded in the perspective of public-centric crisis communication and narrative, conducted a computer-assisted content analysis, using the Latent Dirichlete Allocation (LDA), to identify what and how different crisis narratives about the #MeToo social movement made Twitter users spread the #MeToo campaign message quickly and widely. The results showed: First, celebrities made the issue of the #MeToo social movement become salient and evoked Twitter users to share and comment on celebrities’ posts. However, tweets with celebrity stories did not trigger Twitter users to create their own #MeToo stories to mutually share stories among each other. Second, when different crisis narratives are examined, blame-based narratives tweets motivated higher sharing while renewal-based narratives tweets led to both higher sharing and commenting. Third, gender stereotype was detected in tweets about the #MeToo social movement. Our findings suggest that, for social movement driven public communications aimed to increase public discourse and foster dialogues on Twitter, renewal and blame narratives, with celebrity figures highlighted, seem to be most effective in enhancing social issue engagement among users. Practically, this study provided guidance for organizations to engage in social media activism, telling compelling narratives and reaching a mutual beneficiary relationship between organizations and the public.

Abstract: Social movements and social issue related public discourse has become one of the most impactful public communication phenomena in the digital space. Previous studies have examined the association between information utility and content valence on message virality. However, little is known about what makes certain social movement narrative go viral quicker with greater magnitude than others. Even less explored is how social movements, concerning the same issue, is communicated and spread as narratives in different cultures. To address this, using the #MeToo movements in the U.S. and China as the focal case, we propose a two-phase study to: 1) identify narrative features as evidenced on Twitter and Weibo during #MeToo movement via content analyses; and 2) examine the effects of identified prominent narrative features on public engagement behavioral intention and issue participation on social media via an online experiment in the U.S. and in China. The findings will advance theory building in narrative-based public communications about social issues. Practical insights will be offered on refining social media strategies and tailoring culturally-relevant narrative content and form to engage public dialogues beyond cultural boundaries and facilitate public issue participation globally.