The Online Resources Shared on Twitter About the #MeToo Movement: The Pareto Principle
This research provides a foundational analysis for understanding online resource sharing in social movements like #MeToo, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The study analyzed Twitter data on the #MeToo movement to identify influential shared resources and test the Pareto principle, finding that 8% of domain names accounted for 80% of the content, with top domains including twitter.com (47.20%), nytimes.com (4.42%), and youtube.com (3.69%).
In this paper we examine the most influential resources shared on Twitter about the #MeToo movement. We also examine whether a small proportion of domain names and URLs (e.g. 20%) appear in a large number of tweets (e.g. 80%) that contain #MeToo (known as the 80/20 rule or Pareto principle). R and Python were used to analyze the data. Results demonstrated that the most frequently shared domains were twitter.com (47.20%), nytimes.com (4.42%) and youtube.com (3.69%). The most frequently shared content was a recent poll which indicated "men are afraid to mentor women after the #MeToo movement". In accordance with the Pareto principle, 8% of domain names accounted for 80% of the shared content on Twitter that contained #MeToo. This study provides a base for researchers who are interested in understanding what online resources people rely on when sharing information about online social movements (e.g. #MeToo).