Online Activism: Fighting for social justice online
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 1/23
Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, Brooke Foucault Welles
Northeastern University
Abstract
From the earliest feminist press to Twitter, women have used
technology to create and sustain narratives that demand
attention and redress for gendered violence. Herein we argue
that the #MeToo boom was made possible by the digital labor,
consciousness-raising, and alternative storytelling created
through the #YesAllWomen, #SurvivorPrivilege, #WhyIStayed,
and #TheEmptyChair hashtag networks. Each of these hashtags
highlight women’s experiences with interpersonal and
institutionally-enabled violence and each was precipitated by
high-profile news events. Alongside an examination of Twitter
networks, we consider the social and cultural conditions that
made each hashtag significant at particular moments, examining
the ideological and political work members of these hashtag
networks perform. We find that feminist hashtags have been
successful in creating an easy-to-digest shorthand that challenges
and changes mainstream narratives about violence and
victimhood.
Introduction
In legal, cultural, and mediated discourse, gendered violence has largely been
represented and responded to as an individual problem for both perpetrators and
victims. This (mis)understanding has worked along axes of gender, race, class, and
sexual hierarchies to silence and normalize violence in a variety of contexts (Lafree
1989; Moorti 2001; Richie 2017; Durazo 2016; Meyers 1996). Women who survive
ISSUE NO. 15
Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to
#MeToo
Sarah J. Jackson
Moya Bailey
Brooke Foucault Welles
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 2/23
violence are often questioned on sartorial and locational decisions while men are
rarely held accountable for their violent behavior or are understood as individual bad
actors. Intimate partner violence is often labeled a ‘private issue,’ while law
enforcement officials sometimes perpetuate harm on those already victimized, women
who fight back are often imprisoned, queer and trans people are rarely considered
legitimate victims, and critiques of the cultural values that disable effective
interventions are obscured. In the Digital Age, these phenomena are reproduced online,
where women are often targeted by violent practices like trolling, doxxing, and
swatting, which moves online violence into the offline world (Poland 2016; Manne
2017).
Simultaneously, women’s rights activists have long centered critiques of the systemic
and everyday normalcy that connects misogyny and violence. From the temperance
movement to the ‘sex wars’ of the early 1990s, women have developed alternative
communication channels and self-created and sustained projects — for example, self-
published periodicals, alternative music festivals, and ‘special-interest’ advocacy
organizations. Like media before, the web has also been repurposed as a space for
critique. For survivors of violence, the internet has enabled networks of solidarity
beyond geographical boundaries and consciousness-raising without physical risk. These
networks have responded to and spurred offline efforts that include policy
interventions, the formation of activist organizations and events, and some of the most
visible political and cultural debates about gender in our times. Further the public
nature of the web and technological infrastructures that enable virality have
introduced new possibilities for feminist infiltration of the public sphere and the
centering of women most at the margins. Before the popularization of Twitter, for
example, a photoblog called Hollaback (https://www.ihollaback.org/) ! became a space for
people who experienced street harassment to share photos of their assailants online.
The anonymous website expanded to include social media accounts with tens of
millions of followers and offline chapters in different cities and countries.
Our research focuses on the networks and narratives that formed around hashtags on
Twitter from 2014-2018, where a growing number of people, connected by hashtags and
shared experiences that inspire their deployment, amplify messages central to feminist
critiques of violence. These networks offer cathartic release, build solidarity, and make
consequential demands on a still violently patriarchal society.
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 3/23
#YesAllWomen: The Building Blocks of
Hashtag Solidarity
On May 23, 2014, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger, stabbed his three roommates to death
before embarking on a shooting spree near the campus of the University of California,
Santa Barbara that left three more dead and fourteen injured. Rodger exchanged
gunfire with police before fatally shooting himself in the head. His manifesto and
YouTube videos, which cited a desire to retaliate against women who would not date
him, disdain for immigrants, and disgust for white women who date men of color, was
circulated by many news outlets. A copy of his last video remains on YouTube today
with nearly a million views and has served as dangerous inspiration for online ‘men’s
rights’ and ‘incel’ movements that the Southern Poverty Law Center recently added to
their list of hate groups (Southern Poverty Law Center 2018).
Rodger’s violence sparked a national debate about men’s entitlement and violent
behavior towards women. Writers at popular outlets like Slate and Salon, for example,
wrote about Rodger’s violence as the consequence of the social pressure men are taught
to exert over women (Hess and Keating 2014; Lisa Hickey 2014; Hess 2014). On these
sites, and in response to social media posts and discussions, male readers and
commentators quickly argued that not all men feel or behave this way. Using the
hashtag #NotAllMen created by Twitter user @sassycrass a year earlier, feminists in
turn mocked the recurrent practice of individual men distancing themselves from
misogynistic violence by insisting that they are exceptions. On May 24, 2014, user
@gildedspine, started the hashtag #YesAllWomen to re-center women’s shared
experiences of sexism and misogyny. Within four days, #YesAllWomen had been
tweeted more than a million times.
At its peak, #YesAllWomen appeared in over 60,000 tweets an hour. The oldest and
largest of the hashtags we examine in this article, #YesAllWomen trended in late May,
2014, following the discovery of Rodger’s manifesto. During our observation window
(May 23, 2014 – June 30, 2015) the hashtag was tweeted by over one million distinct
accounts connected by almost 5 million retweets and mentions. Our data include a 10%
random sample of tweets contacting #YesAllWomen gathered from a Twitter decahose
stream (Enterprise API) between May 23, 2014 and June 30, 2015. These data included
101,822 unique users connected by 457,824 retweet and mention links. In the network
visualization (below), users are represented as nodes connected by directed retweet
and mention links. Due to the size of the network, the visualization is limited to users
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 4/23
who were retweeted and/or mentioned 20+ times in the data collection period. The
hashtag trended quickly, with one-quarter of the tweets we observed appearing in the
first day, and nearly two-thirds within the first week. #YesAllWomen remained popular
for another two weeks, an unusually long duration compared with others discussed
below.
Figure 1. Graph illustrating #YesAllWomen network. Nodes are individual Twitter users, links are retweet and mention connections, colors illustrate sub-sets of users who interact with one another more often than with others in the network; note the dense pink cluster where #YesAllWomen originated. The graph was generated using Gephi (0.9.2) using the Yifan Hu Proportional force- directed graph layout algorithm (Hu, 2005).
Though most popular in the US and UK, people geolocated all over the world used the
hashtag. #YesAllWomen often appeared alongside its instigating hashtag, #NotAllMen,
as well as associated political and cultural hashtags, such as #feminism and
#WarOnWomen, a phrase popularized by US Senators Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer
to highlight anti-woman policy efforts like those of U.S. Republicans to defund Planned
Parenthood. Thus, #YesAllWomen and its co-occurring hashtags connected specific and
local political dynamics to global experiences of patriarchal hegemony, rape culture,
and misogyny.
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 5/23
The #YesAllWomen network became a space for women to candidly discuss experiences
with sexism and find solidarity in others’ tweets. As author Soraya Chemaly tweeted,
‘#notallmen practice violence against women but #YesAllWomen live with the threat of
male violence. Every. Single. Day. All over the world.’ By illustrating the everyday
nature of patriarchal and misogynistic thinking, #YesAllWomen documented the impact
of gendered violence, demanded that defensive men sit and listen, and created
rhetorical kinship among women. The popularity of #YesAllWomen illustrates how
early logics of activist slogans and feminist discourse documented by scholars like Beins
(2010) have moved online, and effectively so. Further, just as activist utterances of
solidarity have long worked as a form of interpellation in which collective ideological
identities are built, so too, we suggest, does this process works in online networks
(Althusser 1972; Butler 1993).
As Jackson and Banaszczyk (2016) detailed, the hashtag #YesAllWomen worked
ideologically to (1) to reprioritize the public’s focus from narratives that downplay the
prevalence of men committing violence (vis a vis the reactionary #NotAllMen hashtag)
to narratives acknowledging the frequency of women’s experiences with violence, (2) to
illustrate the connection between everyday sexism and violence, and (3) to legitimize
the concept of rape culture. While many early tweets in the network framed Rodger’s
gun violence as an example of the consequences of misogynistic culture, the network
became much broader, with few of the most popular tweets overall mentioning the
shooting. Members of the network used the tag to connect issues of gender inequality
across economics, healthcare, criminal justice, and business to misogynistic violence
and used illustrative language to show how the prevalence of all kinds of sexism
normalizes violence against women.
Other popular tweets in the network offered, ‘Because when a guy kills six people
because he’s a virgin and women reject him, he’s met with sympathy. #YesAllWomen’
and ‘#YesAllWomen are taught safety tips to prevent rape but not all men are taught
about consent.’ #YesAllWomen was covered extensively in traditional media outlets,
with cable news segments and front page reporting in prominent print publications like
Time, People, NPR, and MSNBC. The success of this hashtag can be measured in both its
popularity and the other hashtags and online debates it spurred. In addition to
responding to #NotAllMen narratives, #YesAllWomen spurred #YesAllWhiteWomen – a
hashtag that called for important intra-community debate about the erasure of women
of color in feminist histories and within the most popularized tweets using the hashtag
itself. Together, the users in the #YesAllWomen network provided a cultural
[1]
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 6/23
intervention that refused to accept the violence perpetrated by Rodgers as an
aberration, instead connecting it to the ways misogyny is normalized and even
celebrated in American culture.
The #YesAllWomen network and the others we examine herein are part of what has
come to be known as ‘Feminist Twitter’ (Freelon et al. 2018). Feminist Twitter is diverse,
influenced heavily — like the hashtags we examine herein — by women of color. It
existed in various forms long before #YesAllWomen thanks to women and feminist
allies online organically building subaltern publics through common concerns. As
Susana Loza (2014) and Jackson and colleagues (2018) have previously noted, not all
feminist hashtags reach, or are intended for, a general audience; women of color,
queer, and trans women in particular have built rather insular — at least at first —
hashtag communities and debates. Yet the public nature of Twitter means that these
subaltern conversations can and do become the focus of public observation and
comment, sometimes being appropriated or misrepresented along the way.
#YesAllWomen appears to have opened the floodgates of this publicness of feminist
hashtag activism — the length of time between the high-profile trending of feminist tags
lessened remarkably around the same time in 2014 — while traditional media outlets
began frequently running profiles on feminist Twitter debates and figures.
#SurvivorPrivilege: Documenting Lasting
Consequences
On June 6, 2014, conservative commentator George Will wrote in an op-ed for The
Washington Post that the way university administrators respond to sexual violence on
campus, ‘make[s] victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges,’ and makes
‘victims proliferate’ (Will 2014). Will’s piece is clearly out of touch with data that shows
sexual assault is not only underreported on college campuses but that survivors face
lasting, damaging consequences as a result of often poorly implemented university
student conduct policies (Moylan 2017; Stotzer and MacCartney 2016). In response,
campus anti-rape activist Wagatwe Wanjunki tweeted, ‘The #SurvivorPrivilege of being
too scared to leave my dorm room for fear of running into my perp.’ Wanjunki went on
to detail other lasting consequences of her assault: ‘Where’s my survivor privilege? Was
expelled & have $10,000s of private student loans used to attend school that didn’t care
I was raped.’ In a follow-up Huffington Post interview, Wanjunki discussed how her
grades began to slip as a result of the assault. Rather than offer assistance, Tufts
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 7/23
University encouraged her to leave. It took her ten years to earn her bachelor’s degree
given the resulting financial burden (Kingkade 2014).
#SurvivorPrivilege trended less than a month after #YesAllWomen. The hashtag first
appeared on June 9, 2014 and remained popular for several days, eventually appearing
in over 20,000 tweets. Tweets continued occasionally in the weeks that followed,
although nearly 87% were posted in the first week, and virtually no tweets containing
the hashtag appeared after July 1, 2014. Our data include 1822 tweets sent by 268
unique users connected by 775 retweet and mention links. Though this is the smallest
of the networks we examine here, many high-profile and central members of feminist
Twitter contributed to this hashtag along with Wanjuki, including feminist
commentators Zerlina Maxwell and Katie Klabusich. Feminist publications and digital
media outlets also shared and spread the hashtag including Mic (formerly PolicyMic)
and Feministing. Mic, for example, interviewed Wanjunki and featured the tweets of
other Twitter users who shared horrific and lasting examples of their so-called
#SurvivorPrivilege in action.
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 8/23
Figure 2. Graph illustrating #SurvivorPrivilege network. Nodes are individual Twitter users, links are retweet and mention connections, colors illustrate sub-sets of users who interact with one another more often than with others in the network, 10 most retweeted/mentioned nodes are labeled.
The hashtag was predominantly anchored by four accounts: George Will (@georgewill)
and The Washington Post (@washingtonpost), author and source of the original article
who were frequently mentioned in tweeted critiques, and Wagatwe Wanjuki
(@wagatwe) and Katie Klabusich (@Katie_Speak) whose initial tweets critiquing Will
were retweeted hundreds of times. Although Will’s Twitter handle appeared most
frequently in the #SurvivorPrivilege network (through mentions) he did not engage
directly with the hashtag or resulting network. Indeed, the most popular co-occurring
hashtags, #Rape, #RapeCulture, and #FireGeorgeWill, illustrate that the prevailing
conversation in the network decisively pushed against Will’s message.
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 9/23
Figure 2. Graph illustrating #SurvivorPrivilege network. Nodes are individual Twitter users, links are retweet and mention connections, colors illustrate sub-sets of users who interact with one another more often than with others in the network, 10 most retweeted/mentioned nodes are labeled.
#SurvivorPrivilege is an example of the thoughtful media criticism that arises from
feminist counterpublics. This media criticism specifically critiqued rape-apology and
victim-blaming narratives that construct survivors, and specifically women survivors,
as diabolical schemers who reap social reward for accusing men of predatory
behaviors. Together, #SurvivorPrivilege tweets focused on (1) the lasting negative
consequences women experience long after surviving victimization, and (2) critique of
high-profile and mainstream narratives that work to victim blame or cast women as
untrustworthy.
For example, one user tweeted: ‘#SurvivorPrivilege is actually finding solace in
absolutely awful, triggering tweets because I know I’m not alone.’ Another wrote:
‘#SurvivorPrivilege was seeing my rapist every morning in the dining hall casually
pouring himself cereal after he threatened to kill me.’ Klabusich tweeted, ‘The
@washingtonpost column wasn’t just a “difference of opinion.” @georgewillf is
contributing violent rhetoric and harm. #survivorprivilege,’ and feminist outlet
Feministing shared their coverage of the story with the headline, ‘#SurvivorPrivilege
shows George Will just how fun it is to be a rape survivor.’
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 10/23
Together the hashtag made the demand that women survivors be heard and that the
severity of consequences faced by victims of violence be acknowledged.
#WhyIStayed: Expanding Victimhood
Three months later #WhyIStayed became an opportunity for survivors of intimate
partner violence to share their stories. Following the September 8, 2014 release of
surveillance video showing Baltimore Ravens football player Ray Rice’s violent attack of
his fiancé Janay Palmer in a casino elevator, many news media outlets engaged in
egregious displays of victim-blaming. The same day, Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” hosts
argued that Palmer set a bad example to other women by following through on the
marriage and staying with Rice throughout prior legal trouble. On air, reporter Brian
Kilmeade quipped that Palmer should have ‘taken the stairs’ to avoid Rice (Boyle 2014).
In a discussion of this news clip with fellow survivors on Twitter, Beverly Gooden
wrote, ‘I stayed because I thought it would get better. It never got any better.
#WhyIStayed.’ The same day, Gooden took to her blog to elaborate on why she created
the hashtag. She wrote (http://www.beverlygooden.com/hear/whyistayed) :
For over a year, I was physically abused by my ex-husband. When TMZ released the
video of Ray Rice punching, dragging, and spitting on his wife this morning, the internet
exploded with questions about her. Why didn’t she leave? Why did she marry him?
Why did she stay? I can’t speak for Janay Rice, but I can speak for Beverly Gooden. Why
did I stay? Check out some of my reasons. Leaving was a process, not an event. And
sometimes it takes awhile to navigate through the process. I believe in storytelling. I
believe in the power of shared experience. I believe that we find strength in
community. That is why I created this hashtag. I hope those tweeting using
#WhyIStayed find a voice, find love, find compassion, and find hope.
Gooden’s tweet and others’ use of the hashtag were amplified as #WhyIStayed appeared
over 100,000 times beginning on September 8, 2014. Our data include more than 13,000
of these tweets, 85% of which were posted in the week following Gooden’s September 8
message. Like #SurvivorPrivilege, #WhyIStayed was relatively short lived with almost
no new tweets appearing after a month had elapsed, suggesting that feminist hashtags
that explicitly complicate tropes of victimhood stay popular only as long as the specific
high-profile cases to which they are attached. The #WhyIStayed tweets were sent by
8,952 users connected by 8,663 retweets and featured messages about Rice and Palmer,
domestic violence, and escaping forms of abuse that are far too often considered
‘private.’ The network centered on creator Gooden (@bevtgooden), who was retweeted
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 11/23
and mentioned twice as often as the next most popular users. While #WhyIStayed is
one of the smaller networks examined here, it is nonetheless diverse including high-
profile male writers like Daniel José Older and Judd Legum who used the hashtag in a
form of allyship to share and highlight women’s experiences, celebrities like actress
Reagan Gomez-Preston (@ReaganGomez), influential members of feminist Twitter (e.g.
Soraya Chemaly and Dana Bolger), advocacy organizations highlighting resources for
domestic violence victims (e.g. @NOMOREorg and @KnowYourIX), and ordinary
women sharing their own stories of abuse and survival.
In #WhyIStayed tweets, two primary narratives emerged that (1) countered popular
victim-blaming narratives, and (2) highlighted toxic relational behaviors and warning
signs as a form of public education. Thus, #WhyIStayed, like others here, responded to
the cultural prevalence of victim-blaming narratives and the work such narratives do to
obscure women’s lived experiences. Women using the hashtag told chilling stories of
men threatening to kill themselves if they left, men sleeping in front of barricaded
doors to prevent their escape, and descriptions of tearful pleas and apologies from
abusers that arrived alongside a barrage of manipulative blaming. Further, the hashtag
offered community around experiences of violence that might otherwise lead to
isolation and shame.
In the case of the emotional and psychological violence that accompanies physical
abuse, the #WhyIStayed hashtag illustrated that victim-blaming narratives extend and
model this interpersonal violence. As @feministabulous tweeted, ‘It’s not one day he
hits you. It’s everyday he works to make you smaller,’ and @juddlegum shared the
following infographic with his over 250,000 followers:
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 12/23
Figure 3. Judd Legum signal boosts infographic on abuse, power, and control in relation to #WhyIStayed
Safe Horizon, one of the nation’s oldest domestic abuse hotlines, used the hashtag to
share statistics on the startling rate of homelessness among women and families fleeing
abuse. Think Progress, the news site run by the Center for American Progress Action
Fund, shared statistics related to the frequent murder of women of color trying to flee
domestic violence. This adoption of the hashtag by advocacy organizations and media is
significant because it illustrates that these organizations follow and respond to
discourses organically produced by ordinary citizens.
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 13/23
Figure 4. Safe Horizon and Think Progress tweet advocacy data on abuse
Together #WhyIStayed demanded a public hearing of survivors of intimate partner
violence and worked discursively through storytelling and data sharing to expand
definitions of legitimate victimhood that have long excluded women who experience
abuse in the private sphere.
By September 10th, even Fox News’ changed its tune, as their Social Buzz segment
(http://video.foxnews.com/v/3777983474001/) included an on-air reading of several tweets with
the hashtag. Other major news outlets including NPR, CNN
(http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/09/living/rice-video-why-i-stayed/index.html) , and USA Today
(https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/09/10/why-i-stayed-hashtag-twitter-ray-
rice/15385027/) covered the hashtag and featured survivors of intimate partner violence
telling their own stories. In late October 2014, The NFL, Ray Rice’s employer, tried to
capitalize on the success of hashtag activism by using #NoMore in an ad campaign
featuring league players offering messages about ending domestic abuse. That month
feminist scholar and activist Beth Richie was recruited by the NFL to assist in
coordinating an effort to address intimate partner violence within the league.
#TheEmptyChair: The Scale of Things
#TheEmptyChair serves as a remarkable example of hashtag creation by a male
feminist ally. On July 27, 2015 New York Magazine ran a cover story that featured an
image of 35 of the women who had come forward to detail abuse and assault at the
hands of Bill Cosby. The powerful image showed each woman sitting in the same chair
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 14/23
looking out from the cover of the magazine. One empty chair at the end of the last row
of women was used to ‘signif[y] the 11 other women who have accused Cosby of assault,
but weren’t photographed for the magazine. But it also represents the countless other
women who have been sexually assaulted but have been unable or unwilling to come
forward’ (Cerone and Fader 2015). The cover was so compelling New York Magazine‘s
website crashed as an overwhelming number of people accessed and shared it.
Activist Bree Newsome and other Twitter users noted the visual power of the empty
chair and comedian and journalist Elon James White started the hashtag
#TheEmptyChair by sharing the cover image with only the hashtag and the hashtag
#BillCosby. At the time of our writing this tweet only has 321 retweets and 168 likes —
but what White did next garnered far more attention. After receiving a direct message
from a rape survivor that read, ‘I can’t share my empty chair story bc I signed an NDA.
needed the money more than justice, and he knew it.’ White agreed to share the tweet
anonymously. His public tweet of this direct message launched a wave of others leading
White to open his Twitter inbox so that anyone could message him privately with the
understanding that he would post their story anonymously using his own Twitter
handle.
White’s tweets prompted the rapid proliferation of #TheEmptyChair, resulting in over
40,000 tweets total. Our data include 4,275 tweets generated by 3,192 users connected
by 3,551 retweets and mentions. Among the hashtags examined in this chapter,
#TheEmptyChair was the shortest-lived, with nearly all of the tweets (91%) posted in
three days following the July 27 New York Magazine story. The network was also
disproportionately driven by a single user — almost 20% of all the tweets were
authored by White or were retweets of his messages. White was retweeted more than
three times as often as the next most-retweeted user. But notably, the tweets he shared,
and which proliferated the network, were not generally in his voice, rather he used his
platform, which includes 70,000+ followers, and the hashtag #TheEmptyChair to
amplify the voices of hundreds of survivors who were too afraid to use their own
handles. White’s activism and the anonymous tweets he shared spurred other Twitter
users to directly shared their stories on the hashtag.
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 15/23
Figure 5. Graph illustrating #TheEmptyChair network. Nodes are individual Twitter users, links are retweet and mention connections, colors illustrate sub-sets of users who interact with one another more often than with others in the network, 5 most retweeted/mentioned nodes are labeled.
#TheEmptyChair worked primarily to show the scale of sexual violence and the scale at
which survivors are silenced. It did this though two types of discourse, that which (1)
affirmed belief in survivors and the value of women’s experience regardless of when
(or if ) they come forward, and (2) called attention to the often-invisible scope of the
problem. This discourse again served as a correction to mainstream narratives that
victim-blame by suggesting that women’s accounts of assaults, in this case due to time
lags on reporting or anonymity, are unreliable. The stories attached to the hashtag
offered important nuance illustrating that given how survivors are treated by media,
the legal system, and the people affiliated with those who perpetrate violence against
them, it is wholly understandable that they fear retribution and revictimization in the
public sphere. White astutely noted in the midst of other’s stories he was sharing,
‘What’s fucking with me most is how many women, hell, how many women I KNOW sit
in #TheEmptyChair because of how we treat rape victims.’
That countless women trusted White to share their stories anonymously despite
knowing their identities shows the close kinship in the network, and the important
work men can do as allies on issues related to violence against women. White, notably,
had built a reputation as an ally in progressive political circles as host of “This Week in
Blackness,” a multimedia platform including a blog and web-series through which he
regularly highlighted the voices and work of Black women. White carefully removed
identifying information from screenshots of the messages he received, choosing to let
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 16/23
these anonymous women speak for themselves without adding commentary to their
stories.
Figure 6: A sample of #TheEmptyChair tweets shared by Elon James White
Like #WhyIStayed, #TheEmptyChair reflected a noticeable diversity of users both part
of and outside of what is generally considered feminist Twitter. Journalist Jamil Smith
also served as an ally in the network tweeting, ‘Do not wait for a man to speak to
believe women who are already talking. Nothing to add. #TheEmptyChair.’ Trans
activist Janet Mock, creator of the hashtag #GirlsLikeUs, tweeted, ‘#TheEmptyChair
signals the women who couldn’t come forward mostly b/c we, as a culture, wouldn’t
believe them.’ Journalist Emily Hauser shared her own reporting on the prevalence of
rape culture, noting, ‘Men have always known that you don’t have to be beloved or
famous to get away with rape… #TheEmptyChair.’ Writer and actress Pia Glenn offered
simply, ‘It could be so many of us sitting in #TheEmptyChair.’
On April 26, 2018, almost three years after the New York Magazine cover story that
iconized the image of the empty chair, Cosby was found guilty of three counts of
indecent assault — a scratch on the surface of the overall accusations he has faced, but
an important moment for women fearful that justice might never come. His conviction
reenergized the hashtag #TheEmptyChair and prompted White to reflect on the
experience. He tweeted that reading those 2015 tweets from women survivors,
‘destroyed my soul.’ He also added that, ‘Even with #metoo happening there are so
many women still in #TheEmptyChair. Folks out here worrying about the men’s lives
supposedly ruined while ignoring all the women who still can’t come forward because
of how society still blames them for their own assault.’
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 17/23
#MeToo: The Tipping Point of Visibility
White’s nod to the connection between #MeToo and #TheEmptyChair is important
because it shows that these hashtags create a discernible genealogy that have important
cultural resonances. #MeToo is also unique because it was an activist campaign before
it was a hashtag. Sexual assault activist Tarana Burke started Me Too in 2007 through
her non-profit Just Be Inc. to provide women and girls the opportunity to connect with
other survivors and access the support they need. However, her work was almost
erased with the adoption of #MeToo in hashtag form by actress Alyssa Milano.
On October 15, 2017 Milano responded to the growing discourse about sexual violence
in Hollywood initially sparked by actresses coming forward about producer Harvey
Weinstein’s serial predatory behavior. Milano tweeted ‘If you’ve been sexually harassed
or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.’ Milano’s tweet, as we write, has over
50,000 likes. The difference in magnitude between Elon James White’s initial call to
acknowledge #TheEmptyChair and Milano’s reintroduction of #MeToo is explained in
part by the evolution of hashtags as a successful vehicle for movement building in
addition to the significantly larger number of followers Milano and other celebrities
who picked up and legitimized #MeToo share.
Further, the gender and racial politics of these hashtags and the communities from
which they sprung tells another part of the story. Notably, Black women were speaking
up about Cosby’s sexual violence for decades, but their voices were not heard. It was
not until another Black male comedian, Hannibal Buress, called Cosby a rapist during a
2014 stand-up show that many in the mainstream discovered the story. Women noted at
the time that stories about Cosby’s behavior were frequently shared by them without
similar mainstream controversy or interest. Thus, Elon James White’s 2015 act of
solidarity with #TheEmptyChair is all the more powerful as it exposes the reality first
laid bare by the response to Buress -that Black men who were seen as Cosby’s in-group
and who carried the benefits of credentialed masculinity were able to propel the
conversation forward in ways that women previously could not. Similarly, Alyssa
Milano, a wealthy, famous, white woman was able to garner a level of attention for
#MeToo that none of the other hashtags examined here enjoyed. Yet, there is no doubt
that without these prior hashtags the conversation that empowered even women in the
most privileged positions to reveal acts of violence perpetrated against them would not
have been as easily received.
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 18/23
The primary frame of #MeToo is one of solidarity and an insistence that stories about
the personal are systemic and political. In their #MeToo stories, women are speaking to
mainstream media, to patriarchal establishments, and directly to one another as a form
of community building that works to alleviate the risk and fear associated with coming
forward that #TheEmptyChair so eloquently illustrated. Like #YesAllWomen, much
more scholarly and media attention has been paid to #MeToo than the other hashtags
we examine here, in large part because of the high profile status of the celebrities
connected to it, but we argue that the #MeToo boom was made possible by its
predecessors and the digital labor, consciousness-raising, alternative storytelling, and
organizing done by #YesAllWomen, #SurvivorPrivilege, #WhyIStayed, #TheEmptyChair
and other hashtags and conversations about gendered violence pushed into visibility on
Twitter.
Both #TheEmptyChair and #MeToo illustrate the power of cross-identity solidarities as
Elon James White continues to use his platform to share the voices of women survivors
and Milano quickly sought to align with Burke in orchestrating the next moves for
#MeToo. Following an immense amount of press around #MeToo thanks to the high-
profile identities of many who responded to Milano’s call, Burke and other women of
color activists partnered with Hollywood actresses and started a new campaign using
the hashtag #TimesUp, putting men and other perpetrators on notice that time is up on
the silence shrouding their abusive behaviors. At the January 2018 75th Annual Golden
Globe Awards, A-list actresses invited Burke and fellow women’s rights activists to the
red carpet, where they donned all black and spoke out about the need for significant
changes in not only the entertainment industry but among all industries in which
women are sexually exploited under the guise of naturalized labor conditions. Since the
hashtagification of #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein has been removed from his organization
and has been charged (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-people-harvey-weinstein/hollywood-mogul-
weinstein-pleads-not-guilty-to-rape-charges-idUSKCN1J115J) with multiple counts of rape and
sexual misconduct in the Manhattan Supreme Court.
Conclusion: The Personal Hashtag is Political
As we have shown here, feminist hashtags have been successful in creating an easy-to-
digest shorthand that speaks to complex concerns. Each hashtag we examine,
#YesAllWomen, #SurvivorPrivilege, #TheEmptyChair, #WhyIStayed, and #MeToo, can
be understood as part of a larger cultural intervention which responded as needed to
high-profile news stories and events, allowing the counter-narratives of the feminist
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 19/23
public sphere to infiltrate the mainstream public sphere. This illustrates the
adaptability of digital feminism as it enacts traditions of feminist storytelling. Together
these hashtags provide a source of discursive and collective energy that catalyzes both
on and offline movement work, leading to powerful cultural repercussions and yes,
change.
Further, these hashtags embody the feminist demand that ‘the personal is political,’ and
illustrate how storytelling on Twitter raises consciousness, creates solidarity, and
promulgates new cultural narratives. The widely observed ‘#MeToo moment’ is not so
much a moment but a loud chorus of voices that has, for years, been using Twitter and
other social networks to tell women’s stories about violence in a way that challenges the
simplistic frames relied on by mainstream media and politicians. In these networks
women tell their own stories, women are believed, male and celebrity allies helped to
elevate ordinary women’s voices, and women — experts in their own lives — offer
nuance to all too often oversimplified and inaccurately reported issues of violence and
victimhood.
Finally, we find it significant that the most high-profile and resonant feminist hashtags
of the last six years, including those examined here, were started by or inspired by the
online and offline labor of women of color. This speaks quite profoundly to the history
of Black and third-world feminisms in offering creative, inclusive, and succinct
critiques of and solutions to gendered violence and speaks to the ways women of color
have found new opportunities to speak truth to power in the digital age.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge our research assistants, Ryan Gallagher and Devin Gaffney,
and the support of NVIDIA Corporation for the donation of the Titan Xp GPU used for
this research.
Authors Note
We have only named users throughout this article who meet two criteria: (1) have
public Twitter accounts, and (2) can be classified as public figures or have opted to
speak with journalists about their experiences using their real names. In other cases,
user’s handles have been removed to protect them from unnecessary scrutiny. [[1]]
Works Cited
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 20/23
Althusser, Louis. 1972. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press.
Richie, Andrea. 2017. Invisible No More. Beacon Press.
Beins, Agatha. 2010. “Sisterly Solidarity: Politics and Rhetoric of the Direct Address in
US Feminism in the 1970s.” Women: A Cultural Review 21 (3): 292-308.
https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2010.513492.
Boyle, Louise. 2014. “Fox Host Jokes ‘Take the Stairs’ after Ray Rice Elevator Attack
Video.” Mail Online. September 8, 2014. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-
2748374/Fox-host-jokes-stairs-Ray-Rice-elevator-attack-video.html.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge.
Cerone, Ella, and Lainna Fader. 2015. “35 Women and #TheEmptyChair.” The Cut. July
28, 2015. https://www.thecut.com/2015/07/35-women-and-theemptychair.html.
Durazo, Ana Clarissa Rojas. 2016. “The Medicalization of Domestic Violence.” In Color of
Violence: The INCITE! Anthology. South End Press.
Freelon, Deen, Meredith D. Clark, Sarah J. Jackson, and Lori Lopez. 2018. “How Black
Twitter and Other Social Media Communities Interact with Mainstream News.” Knight
Foundation. 2018. https://knightfoundation.org/reports/how-black-twitter-and-other-
social-media-communities-interact-with-mainstream-news.
Hess, Amanda. 2014. “‘If I Can’t Have Them, No One Will’: How Misogyny Kills Men.”
Slate, May 29, 2014.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/05/29/elliot_rodger_hated_men_because_he_hated_wome
Hess, Amanda, and Joshua Keating. 2014. “The Pick-Up Artist Community’s Predictable,
Horrible Response to a Mass Murder.” Slate, May 24, 2014.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/05/24/elliot_rodger_the_pick_up_artist_community_s_pre
Hu, Yifan. 2005. Efficient, high-quality force-directed graph drawing. Mathematica
Journal, 10(1), 37-71.
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 21/23
Jackson, Sarah J., Bailey, Moya, and Foucault Welles, Brooke. 2018. #GirlsLikeUs: Trans
advocacy and community building online. New Media & Society, 20(5), pp.1868-1888.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817709276
Jackson, Sarah J., and Sonia Banaszczyk. 2016. “Digital Standpoints: Debating Gendered
Violence and Racial Exclusions in the Feminist Counterpublic.” Journal of
Communication Inquiry 40 (4): 391-407. https://doi.org/10.1177/0196859916667731.
Kingkade, Tyler. 2014. “The Woman Behind #SurvivorPrivilege Was Kicked Out Of
School After Being Raped.” Huffington Post, June 12, 2014, sec. College.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/12/survivor-privilege-wagatwe-
wanjuki_n_5489170.html.
Lafree, Gary. 1989. Rape and Criminal Justice: The Social Construction of Sexual Assault.
Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth Pub Co.
Lisa Hickey. 2014. “Elliot Rodger and America’s Ongoing Masculinity Crisis |
Salon.com.” May 28, 2014.
https://www.salon.com/2014/05/28/elliot_rodger_and_americas_ongoing_masculinity_crisis_partner/
Loza, S., 2014. “Hashtag feminism,# SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, and the other
#FemFuture.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, (5).
https://adanewmedia.org/2014/07/issue5-loza/
Manne, Kate. 2017. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford, New York: Oxford
University Press.
Meyers, Marian. 1996. News Coverage of Violence against Women: Engendering Blame.
Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc.
Moorti, Sujata. 2001. Color of Rape: Gender and Race in Television’s Public Spheres.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Moylan, Carrie A. 2017. “‘I Fear I’m a Checkbox’: College and University Victim
Advocates’ Perspectives of Campus Rape Reforms.” Violence Against Women 23 (9):
1122-39. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801216655623.
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 22/23
Poland, Bailey. 2016. Haters: Harassment, Abuse, and Violence Online. Lincoln: Potomac
Books.
Southern Poverty Law Center. 2018. “For Incels, It’s Not about Sex. It’s about Women.”
Southern Poverty Law Center. May 4, 2018.
https://www.splcenter.org/news/2018/05/04/weekend-read-incels-its-not-about-sex-its-
about-women.
Stotzer, Rebecca L., and Danielle MacCartney. 2016. “The Role of Institutional Factors on
On-Campus Reported Rape Prevalence.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 31 (16): 2687-
2707. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260515580367.
Will, George F. 2014. “George Will: Colleges Become the Victims of Progressivism.”
Washington Post, June 6, 2014, sec. Opinions.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-college-become-the-victims-of-
progressivism/2014/06/06/e90e73b4-eb50-11e3-9f5c-9075d5508f0a_story.html.
—CITATION—
Bailey, Moya. Jackson, Sarah. Welles, Brooke Foucault (2019). “Women Tweet on
Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and
Technology, No. 15. 10.5399/uo/ada.2019.15.6
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
Footnotes ( returns to text)
1.
Sarah J. Jackson (https://adanewmedia.org/author/SarahJackson)
PEER REVIEWED
2/27/2021 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo - Ada New Media
https://adanewmedia.org/2019/02/issue15-bailey-jackson-welles/ 23/23
Sarah J. Jackson is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies and faculty af�liate of
the program for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Department of Cultures,
Societies and Global Studies at Northeastern University.
Moya Bailey (https://adanewmedia.org/author/moyabailey1)
Moya Bailey is a graduate of the Emory University Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Department. She is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media
and medicine. She is the founder and co-conspirator of Quirky Black Girls, a network for
strange and different black girls. She loves all things Octavia Butler and is part of a group
planning a series of events to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Butler's passing in
2016.
Brooke Foucault Welles (https://adanewmedia.org/author/BrookeWells)
Brooke Foucault Welles is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies and core
faculty in the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. Collectively they are
authoring a forthcoming book on race, gender, and hashtag activism.
Copyright © 2012-2021. All work on this website is distributed
under a Creative Commons license. The default license for the
content on Ada is a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported License. Individual
article copyright terms may differ. Please refer to each article for
its license.
Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology
ISSN 2325-0496