New approaches to the propagation of the antifeminist backlash on Twitter

  1. Gutiérrez Almazor, Miren
  2. Pando Canteli, Maria J.
  3. Congosto Martínez, María Luz
Journal:
Investigaciones feministas

ISSN: 2171-6080

Year of publication: 2020

Issue Title: Metodologías Feministas: nuevas perspectivas

Volume: 11

Issue: 2

Pages: 221-237

Type: Article

DOI: 10.5209/INFE.66089 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openOpen access editor

More publications in: Investigaciones feministas

Sustainable development goals

Abstract

A year after the #MeToo movement erupted, antifeminism started to retort. The idea behind the backlash was that ‘the men who have been accused are the heroes’ (Tolentino, 2018). Twitter was one of the public spaces where this confrontation occurred; the #HimToo backlash gathered steam in 2018 (Asimov, 2018) and expanded into 2019. Focussing on the reactions against #Cuéntalo Twitter campaign –the Spanish equivalent to #MeToo—, this article examines how the antifeminist backlash proliferates, offering a view of the dynamics driving it. The authors choose an eclectic and interdisciplinary approach that integrates graph theory and CDA (Critical Discourse Analysis), thus connecting social media formulations with offline discourses, and proposing new ways of studying social movements. To examine the backlash’s characteristics, this study utilises Congosto’s typology of Twitter profiles (Congosto, 2018). Findings suggest that both approaches are complementary and necessary, for while graph analysis enables the distinction of antifeminist communities on Twitter and their behaviour and characteristics, CDA allows investigators to uncover their discursive strategies and favoured themes.

Bibliographic References

  • Asimov, N. (2018). #MeToo movement spurs #HimToo backlash: ‘People don’t want to believe’. San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved from https://www.sfchronicle.com/nation/article/MeToo-movement-spurs-HimToo-backlash-People-13304270.php
  • Bastian, M., & Heymann, S. (2009). Gephi : An Open Source Software for Exploring and Manipulating Networks. American Journal of Sociology, 361–362.
  • Bernard, H.R. (2006). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. FAltaMira Press.
  • Blondel, V. D., Guillaume, J.-L., Lambiotte, R., & Lefebvre, E. (2008). Fast unfolding of communities in large networks. 6. https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-5468/2008/10/P10008
  • Castells, M. (2009). Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Chouliaraki, L., & Fairclough, N. (1999). Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.
  • Clatterbaugh, K. (2003). Antifeminism. In M. Kimmel & A. Aronson (Eds.), Men & Masculinities: A Social, Cultural, and Historical Encyclopedia: Vol. 1 A-J (pp. 35–37). Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.
  • Congosto, M. (2018). Digital sources: a case study of the analysis of the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain on the social network Twitter. Culture & History Digital Journal, 7(2). doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3989/chdj.2018.015
  • Congosto, M. L. (2016). Caracterización de usuarios y propagación de mensajes en twitter en el entorno de temas sociales (PhD Thesis, Universidad Carlos III).
  • Conover, M. D., Ratkiewicz, J., Francisco, M., Gonc, B., Flammini, A., & Menczer, F. (2010). Political Polarization on Twitter. Networks, 89–96.
  • Demirhana, K., & Cakır-Demirhan, D. (2015). Gender and politics: Patriarchal discourse on social media. Public Relations Review, 41, 308–310.
  • Ellis, E. G. (2018). How #HimToo Became The Anti #Metoo Of The Kavanaugh Hearings. Wired. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/story/brett-kavanaugh-hearings-himtoo-metoo-christine-blasey-ford/
  • Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge and London: Polity Press.
  • Fairclough, Norman. (2012). Critical discourse analysis. In J. P. Gee & M. Handford (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Abingdon: Routledge Handbooks.
  • Fairclough, Norman, & Wodak, R. (1997). Critical discourse analysis. In T. A. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse as Social Interaction (pp. 258–284). London: Sage.
  • Faludi, S. (2006). Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York: Three Rivers Press.
  • Ging, D. & Siapera, E. (2019). Gender Hate Online: Understanding the New Anti-Feminism. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Glaser, B.G., and Strauss, A.L. (1999). The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. London: Aldine Transaction.
  • Goodwin, J., Jasper, J. M., & Polletta, F. (2001). Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements. In D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule, & H. Kriesi (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (pp. 414–432).
  • Goodwin, J., Jasper, J. M., & Polletta, F. (2004). Emotional Dimensions of Social Movements. In D. A. Snow, S. A. Soule, & H. Kriesi (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (Blackwell Companions to Sociology). Malden, Oxford, Carlton: Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Hanash Martínez, M. (2018). Disciplinamiento Sexual: Cazando Brujas y Ciberfeministas. VII Congreso Universitario Internacional Investigación y Género, 339–350.
  • Hirsch, J. E. (2005). An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 102(46), 16569–16572. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0507655102
  • Hsieh, H.F., and Shannon, S.E. (2005). Three Approaches to Qualitative Content Analysis. Qualitative Health Research 15, 9, 277–1288. doi:10.1177/1049732305276687
  • Jacomy, M., Venturini, T., Heymann, S., & Bastian, M. (2014). ForceAtlas2, a continuous graph layout algorithm for handy network visualization designed for the Gephi software. PLoS ONE, 9, 6, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0098679
  • Kimmel, M., & Aronson, A. (2003). Men & Masculinities: A Social, Cultural, and Historical Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
  • KhosraviNik, M. (2017). Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS). In: Flowerdew, J; Richardson,J, ed. Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies. London: Routledge, 582-596.
  • KhosraviNik, M. & Esposito E. (2018). Online hate, digital discourse and critique: Exploring digitally-mediated discursive practices of gender-based hostility. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 14, 1, 45-68.
  • KhosraviNik, M. & Unger J. (2016) Critical Discourse Studies and Social Media: power, resistance and critique in changing media ecologies. In: Wodak R. and Meyer M., ed. Methods of Critical Discourse Studies. Sage Publications, 206-233.
  • Krzyzanowski, M., & Wodak, R. (2009). The Politics of Exclusion. The Austrian Case. Boulder: Transaction Press.
  • Kudors, A. & Pabriks, A. (2017). The rise of populism. Riga: The Centre for East European Policy Studies.
  • Landsbaum, C. (2016). Men’s-Rights Activists Are Finding a New Home With the Alt-Right. The Cut. Retrieved from https://www.thecut.com/2016/12/mens-rights-activists-are-flocking-to-the-alt-right.html
  • Levitt, H. (2018). Why #MeToo is not a positive development in the workplace. Financial Post. Retrieved from https://business.financialpost.com/executive/why-metoo-is-not-a-positive-development-in-the-workplace
  • Lewis, H. (2019). To Learn About the Far Right, Start With the ‘Manosphere’. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/08/anti-feminism-gateway-far-right/595642/
  • Littman, J. (2017). Where to get Twitter data for academic research. Retrieved from Social Feed Manager website: https://gwu-libraries.github.io/sfm-ui/posts/2017-09-14-twitter-data
  • Majo-Vazquez, S., Congosto, M., Nicholls, T., & Nielsen,R. (2018, December). The Role of Suspended Accounts in Political Discussion on Social Media: Analysis of the 2017 French, UK and German Elections. Presented at the EuroCSS diciembre 2018, Cologne.
  • Mantilla, K. (2015). How Misogyny Went Viral. Westpoint: Praeger.
  • Mantilla, K. (2018). Inside the manosphere. In SBS Dateline. Retrieved from https://documentaries.io/film/inside-the-manosphere/
  • Mukherjee, S., & Bhattacharyya, S. (2012). Sentiment Analysis in Twitter with Lightweight Discourse Analysis. The International Committee on Computational Linguistics, 1847–1864. Retrieved from https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/C12-1113
  • Nagle, A. (2017). Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Winchester, Whashington: Zero Books.
  • Nagulendra, S., & Vassileva, J. (2014). Understanding and Controlling the Filter Bubble through Interactive Visualization: A User Study. 25th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, 107–115. https://doi.org/10.1145/2631775.2631811
  • Qian, V. (2017). Step-By-Step Twitter Sentiment Analysis: Visualizing United Airlines’ PR Crisis. Retrieved from iPullRank. Retrieved from https://ipullrank.com/step-step-twitter-sentiment-analysis-visualizing-united-airlines-pr-crisis/
  • Ray, D., & Tarafdar, M. (2017). How Does Twitter Influence A Social Movement? Proceedings of the 25th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), 3123–3132.
  • Schradie, J. (2015, February 4). 5 reasons why online Big Data is Bad Data for researching social movements. Mobilizing Ideas. Retrieved from https://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/5-reasons-why-online-big-data-is-bad-data-for-researching-social-movements/
  • Schutzbach, F. (2019). Anti-feminism is making right-wing stances socially acceptable. Heinrich Boell Stiftung. Retrieved from https://www.gwi-boell.de/en/2019/05/03/anti-feminism-making-right-wing-stances-socially-acceptable
  • Segall, S. B. (2018). #HimToo. Retrieved from HW Defense website: https://www.hrdefenseblog.com/2018/05/himtoo/
  • Statista. (2019). Leading countries based on number of Twitter users as of July 2019 (in millions). Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-of-active-twitter-users-in-selected-countries/
  • Theocharis, Y., Lowe, W., van Deth, J. W., & García-Albacete, G. (2015). Using Twitter to mobilize protest action: online mobilization patterns and action repertoires in the Occupy Wall Street, Indignados, and Aganaktismenoi movements. Information, Communication & Society, 18(2), 202–220. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2014.948035
  • Tolentino, J. (2018). One Year of #MeToo: What Women’s Speech Is Still Not Allowed to Do. The Newyorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/one-year-of-metoo-what-womens-speech-is-still-not-allowed-to-do
  • Tornberg, A., & Tornberg, P. (2016). Muslims in social media: Combining topic modelling and critical discourse analysis. Discourse, Context and Media, 13, 132–142. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2016.04.003
  • Twitter Developer. (2019). Get Tweet engagement. Retrieved from https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/metrics/get-tweet-engagement/guides/interpreting-metrics.html
  • Twitter Help Center. (2019). About suspended accounts. Retrieved from Managing Your Account website: https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/suspended-twitter-accounts
  • Unger, J., Wodak. R, Khosravi N.M. (2016). Critical Discourse Studies and Social Media Data. In: Silverman D., ed. Qualitative Research. London: SAGE, 277-293.
  • Valdés, I. (2018). Los 14 días en los que 150.000 mujeres no se callaron. El País. Retrieved from https://elpais.com/sociedad/2018/12/12/actualidad/1544617022_492358.html
  • van Dijk, T. A. (2015). Critical Discourse Analysis. In D. Tannen, D. Schiffrin, & Hamilton (Eds.), Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Madden, Oxford, Chichester: Blackwell Pub.
  • Williams, Z. (2015). Feminazi: the go-to term for trolls out to silence women. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/15/feminazi-go-to-term-for-trolls-out-to-silence-women-charlotte-proudman
  • Wodak, R. (2011). ‘Us’ and ‘Them: Inclusion adnExclusion – Discrimination via discourse. In G. Delanty, R. Wodak, & P. Jones (Eds.), Migration, Identity and Belonging. Liverpool: Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
  • Wodak, R. (Ed.). (2013). Critical discourse analysis. London, UK: Sage.
  • Wodak, R., de Cilia, R., Reisigl, M., & Liebhart, K. (1999). The discursive construction of national identity. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.
Data source: Dialnet