#MeToo on Campus: Studying College Sexual Assault at Scale Using Data Reported on Social Media
This research addresses the problem of understanding sexual assault in academia for researchers and policymakers by providing data-driven insights from social media, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The paper tackled the problem of studying college sexual assault by analyzing #MeToo tweets, finding that most tweets detail harassment stories and show significant correlation with official reports in major regions, and discovered sentiments and implications for affected users.
Recently, the emergence of the #MeToo trend on social media has empowered thousands of people to share their own sexual harassment experiences. This viral trend, in conjunction with the massive personal information and content available on Twitter, presents a promising opportunity to extract data driven insights to complement the ongoing survey based studies about sexual harassment in college. In this paper, we analyze the influence of the #MeToo trend on a pool of college followers. The results show that the majority of topics embedded in those #MeToo tweets detail sexual harassment stories, and there exists a significant correlation between the prevalence of this trend and official reports on several major geographical regions. Furthermore, we discover the outstanding sentiments of the #MeToo tweets using deep semantic meaning representations and their implications on the affected users experiencing different types of sexual harassment. We hope this study can raise further awareness regarding sexual misconduct in academia.