Mapping an emerging hashtag ecosystem: connective action and interpretive frames in the Swedish #MeToo movement

ABSTRACT

When #MeToo reached Sweden in the fall of 2017, it gave rise to nearly 80 industry-specific petitions that demanded a stop to sexual misconduct in the workplace, some with their own hashtags. This article examines the discourse of #MeToo on Twitter in Sweden in relation to these petition hashtags. Focusing on how #MeToo, petition hashtags, and other hashtags are co-articulated in Tweets, it maps the emergent network of hashtags using SNA and explores the resulting interpretative frames using discourse analysis. By co-articulating the MeToo and petition hashtags with hashtags related to Swedish politics and feminism, and by utilising the @-mention function to call out responsible politicians and industry executives, Twitter users extended the initial #MeToo frame beyond individualised problems and solutions common in connective action networks. We suggest that Twitter users utilise platform affordances to perform framing work in relation to political hashtags, not unlike framing work performed in traditional social movements.

KEYWORDS:

• Hashtag activism
• MeToo
• feminism
• framing
• social media

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All Tweet examples are translated from Swedish to English, and slightly reworded, by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Lindqvist

Lisa Lindqvist is a PhD student in Sociology at Karlstad University, Sweden. Her research interests include mixed methods approaches to social media activism, framing practices in political hashtags, and user experiences of doing feminism in digital spaces. Her focus is on the Swedish #MeToo movement as a sociotechnical phenomenon, its constituent discourses, and the affective dimensions of participation.

Simon Lindgren

Simon Lindgren is Professor of Sociology at Umeå University, Sweden, and director of DIGSUM, an interdisciplinary academic research centre for the study of social dimensions of digital technology. His research is about politics, power, and resistance at the intersection of society and digital technologies. He uses critical discourse approaches, computational text analysis, and social network analysis to study issues relating to movements, mobilization, opinions, and identities.