Essay #MeToo

Elena Meisel

INTER 1

The Digital Revolution

Social media is online content created by people using highly accessible publishing technologies. Basically, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It is a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many media) into dialogues (many to many media) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into authors. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal, political and business use. Today, social media has become the biggest worldwide exchange platform in terms of information where people can express their ideas and convictions.

I decided to focus this essay on the #MeToo which has had a lot of impact on our generation because it denounces sexual harassment and assault on women in the professional sphere. This hashtag has spread virally, especially on Twitter, after the public revelations of sexual misconduct allegations against Harvey Weinstein, the famous film producer. The phrase was popularized by Alyssa Milano when she encouraged women to tweet about it in October 2017 and "give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem". The response on Twitter included high-profile posts from several celebrities including Gwyneth Paltrow, Ashley Judd, Jennifer Lawrence, and Uma Thurman. This hashtag is quite a phenomenon because it was a way for women to free and liberate themselves from their burden.

To which extent has Twitter shaped the content of the #MeToo and influenced its exposure and impact on the society?

In the first part of this essay, I will explain some details about Twitter. Then, I will tell you about the origins of this social phenomenon and focus on how Twitter influenced the impact of #MeToo over the society.

Twitter’s influence on our lives

About Twitter’s global functioning, it is characterized by messages of 280 (used to be 140) characters maximum. These messages aren’t addressed to one person in particular but to everybody who follows the person who published the message. It is also possible to send private messages to only one person. There are two big principles of functioning on Twitter which are the follows and the subjects of conversation. Twitter can be used in two ways; to receive the information or to send it. When we follow someone, we receive its information by “tweets” which are Twitter’s short messages. These messages arrive on the Timeline where information is displayed progressively after it is published. A tweet can also contain links to articles, images and videos but cannot overcome 280 characters because Twitter’s purpose is to go straight to the point. You can follow anyone you like such as friends, politics, celebrities and even brands. To be more visible on Twitter, the trick is to use key-words, which can be translated as hashtags. The more people use the same hashtag, the more the hashtag is popular and can have a huge impact on the population. Twitter has quite a vocabulary to assimilate if we want to use it such as tweets, timeline, followers, following, hashtag (said before) but also at (@) when we want to mention someone and the retweet if we want to share something that has already been tweeted.

Like other social medias, Twitter also has an algorithm. The Twitter timeline algorithm is constantly changing. Twitter runs dozens of tests with its timeline every month. In fact, Deepak Rao, the product manager of the Twitter timeline, said, “Our algorithm changes on an almost daily to weekly basis”. As the Twitter timeline algorithm has helped to increase Twitter’s key metrics, it’s likely that Twitter will continue to test new ideas with its timeline. But Twitter would probably not use a fully-algorithmic timeline, unlike the Facebook News Feed or Instagram feed. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, had said that Twitter will remain live and real-time.

In addition, Twitter is one of the most utilized social media because it is transgenerational, it has managed to become indispensable for people at any age. From teenagers to adults, and from politics to celebrities, 336 million of people use it because now it replaces the news (because it shows everything that happens on schedule) and is even used to share and enhance political ideas. Indeed, we can refer to José Van Dijck’s and Thomas Poell’s social media logic: “Besides print news and broadcasting, social media also affects law and order, social activism, politics, and so forth. Therefore, its sustaining logic and widespread dissemination deserve to be scrutinized in detail in order to better understand its impact in various domains”. This explains that social media such as Twitter has quite a lot of impact on the society because the whole world can basically do anything they want on it, and even creating social movements such as #DressLikeAWoman, #HeForShe, and #BlackLivesMatter where the population mobilizes itself to defend a cause.

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