Drunk Girl: A brief thematic analysis of Twitter posts about alcohol use and #MeToo

Calandra Lindstadt, Brittany P. Boyer, Erica Ciszek, Arnold Chung, & Gary Wilcox

This research brief presents analyses aimed at characterizing the content of a corpus of original and retweeted Twitter posts related to the role of alcohol intoxication in sexual assault within the context of the #MeToo movement. A text-mining approach was used to collect 25,014 tweets and retweets containing #MeToo and keywords involving alcohol intoxication posted during the year after #MeToo went viral (October 15, 2017 to October 15, 2018). A combination of algorithm-driven cluster analysis and manual qualitative analysis was used to discover the most prominent themes. Analyses revealed that the content of tweets related to alcohol use and #MeToo were overwhelmingly centered around U.S.politics. Analysis of a subsample of 5,566 original (i. e., non-retweeted) tweets revealed fewer politically-focused topics and a noteworthy theme expressing concern for men in the #MeToo era. Findings are discussed in relation to political discourse on social media, the use of #MeToo to express political ideologies, and implications for supporting sexual assault survivors.

Keywords: #Metoo; Alcohol; Sexual Assault; Social Media; Victim Blaming