October marks a year since the reporting on Harvey Weinstein that earned The New York Times and The New Yorker a Pulitzer Prize. On October 5, 2017, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke their story, and on October 10th Ronan Farrow published his exposé.
Last year, Ronan Farrow’s piece “From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories” was the most engaging article across ten categories of content in our network. Average engaged time for The New Yorker story was nearly seven minutes, meaning people spent more time with the article than 99% of the other content in our network.
One year later, what does online attention look like for the #MeToo movement? Which stories are people paying attention to and how are they finding them? What’s the context in which the media is framing stories about #MeToo and sexual harassment?
Data from Currents, September 3, 2018 – October 3, 2018
Here are three high-level insights from network data to contextualize how people are paying attention to stories tied to #MeToo versus sexual harassment online, a year after the movement began.
#MeToo stories are framed in the entertainment industry, sexual harassment in politics
Speaking out and taking action against sexual harassment and gender inequality is central to the #MeToo movement. That being said, articles about the movement itself and about sexual harassment don’t always overlap in our network.
Classifying and analyzing articles through NLP, or natural language processing, shows when the topics overlap and when they appear separately. Comparing attention data for “Me Too movement” and “sexual harassment” in Currents, sometimes sexual harassment and #MeToo are discussed in the same piece, but sometimes they’re written about in different contexts.
The top related categories indicate how outlets are covering each topic. Television (Arts & Entertainment) is the second highest related category for #MeToo, while it doesn’t appear at all on the list of related topics for sexual harassment.
Data from Currents, September 3, 2018 – October 3, 2018. 10% of views to articles about the #MeToo movement are related to Television.
#MeToo originated with accusations against a Hollywood producer and has continued to expose people in power in the entertainment industry. Time’s Up, an initiative launched by over 300 women in Hollywood to promote workplace gender equality, evolved out of the #MeToo movement. While #MeToo is more closely associated with the entertainment business, sexual harassment is being covered in the context of politics, legal issues, and news:
Data from Currents, September 3, 2018 – October 3, 2018. 29% of views to articles about sexual harassment are related to Legal Issues.
However, sexual harassment and #Metoo are both most often discussed in context with Law, Government, and Politics stories, the biggest content category across our network overall. 75% of views to articles about sexual harassment are related to Law, Government, and Politics, compared to 70% for #MeToo.
Top stories include articles about Les Moonves / CBS and Brett Kavanaugh
The top related stories for #MeToo vs. sexual harassment are also framed in the context of the entertainment industry and the political stage. The people at the center of the top #MeToo stories are media executives and actors.
Top related stories for #MeToo:
- Les Moonves / CBS / Donald Trump
- Norm Macdonald / Roseanne Barr / Louis C.K.
- Woody Allen / Mia Farrow / Soon-Yi Previn
Top related stories for sexual harassment:
- Brett Kavanaugh / Jeff Flake / sexual assault
- Mark Cuban / sexual harassment / Dallas Mavericks
- Brett Kavanaugh
While the top stories associated with #MeToo are concentrated in the entertainment industry, stories about sexual harassment cover a broader spectrum. The top story about sexual harassment falls under the umbrella of the biggest story in the entire network over this time frame, in the realm of politics. Stories about the Brett Kavanaugh hearings had over 35 million views from September 3rd to October 3rd.
Homepages and internal recirculation are the primary mode of discovering stories
Of the five modes of discovering stories considered in the data set—social media, search engines, editorial and recirculation, direct traffic, and other—both topics received the most traffic through editorial and recirculation.
Editorial and recirculation, which includes readers getting to stories by clicking a link on a homepage, a section page, or another article, sent 30% of traffic to #MeToo articles and 31% of traffic to sexual harassment articles. The network average for editorial traffic was 24% during the time frame studied.
Editorial coverage drew in a significant number of readers, though there was more readership, articles, and views per articles for #MeToo.
Data from Currents, September 3, 2018 – October 3, 2018
#MeToo has far more total views, but there are fewer articles about sexual harassment. Is there potential for more reader demand of articles explicitly covering the topic of sexual harassment, which is less saturated with content than #MeToo?
Looking at the geographic breakdown of where people are reading articles in the U.S., there’s a sense that demand for content about sexual harassment is more widespread.
Data from Currents, September 3, 2018 – October 3, 2018
Readership for #MeToo is clustered on the West Coast and in DC, which has 1.5 times the expected traffic to articles. Attention for sexual harassment is strong on the West Coast, too, but is also more generally evident across the country.
The media vs. the public: are there differences in how both groups are paying attention to #MeToo?
In The Atlantic, Shan Wang makes an important point about gaps in viewership and readership data when it comes to the Kavanaugh hearings. The media is “transfixed” by the hearings, but can the same be said for readers?
The same question applies to the broader topics of #MeToo and sexual harassment. The data points to a difference in how stories about both topics are framed. Readers are mostly finding articles through editorial promotion via homepages or recommended articles, but the volume of readership differs for each topic.
From this bird’s eye view of one slice of the internet, whether you find yourself covering the movement, reading about it, or speaking and acting out against gender inequalities and harassment, when we’re discussing #MeToo, are we talking about policy change? Is reader demand for coverage about sexual harassment being met by article volume? And how does coverage relate to the end goals of the movement?
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