Online Activism: Fighting for social justice online

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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

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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.

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#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

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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.

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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]

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.’

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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

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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:

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.’

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#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.

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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

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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]]

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—CITATION—

Bailey, Moya. Jackson, Sarah. Welles, Brooke Foucault (2019). “Women Tweet on

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(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.

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