#MeToo: Social Media a Great Release for Pent up Emotions
The news of Harvey Weinstein's expulsion from the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences over the weekend prompted victims to share
their own experiences of sexual harassment and assault. The rich and
famous of course can talk to the press, but what happens to the masses
who often are never heard? Today they have an outlet in social media. In
fact platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been flooded with women
relating their own private experiences with sexual harassment thus far
never expressed even to some of their dear ones.
For the women in these stories, the mental anguish is real. The endurance of going into an office where someone constantly makes overt sexual references is hard to explain to those who have never experienced it. A 2015 study found that one in three women have been sexually harassed and that 71 percent did not report it. That's a staggering statistic. And yet for many, speaking about their troubles was not easy until now. But thanks to the age of social media, there has been an outpouring of emotion, following the complicity of Harvery Weinstein.
Thousands of women have shared stories of sexual harassment online using the #MeToo hashtag and hundreds of men are vowing to help using a hashtag of their own.
The #HowIWillChange hashtag kicked off more than a week ago, with Sydney-based writer Benjamin Law calling for men to share how they will help tackle the culture of sexual harassment.
When Facebook removed positive posts from the news feeds of more than 680,000 users, those users made fewer positive posts and more negative ones. Similarly, when negative posts were removed, the opposite occurred.
The findings provide experimental evidence that emotions can be contagious, even without direct interaction or nonverbal cues, the researchers say.
"These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions," the authors wrote in the study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It has worked. Millions of women around the world have been expressing themselves and there has been an outpouring of painful recollections on Twitter and Facebook which have shed new light on how pervasive the problem really is.
Social Media hopefully has helped in some small way in therapeutically healing the millions of women who couldn't express themselves thus far.
For the women in these stories, the mental anguish is real. The endurance of going into an office where someone constantly makes overt sexual references is hard to explain to those who have never experienced it. A 2015 study found that one in three women have been sexually harassed and that 71 percent did not report it. That's a staggering statistic. And yet for many, speaking about their troubles was not easy until now. But thanks to the age of social media, there has been an outpouring of emotion, following the complicity of Harvery Weinstein.
Thousands of women have shared stories of sexual harassment online using the #MeToo hashtag and hundreds of men are vowing to help using a hashtag of their own.
The #HowIWillChange hashtag kicked off more than a week ago, with Sydney-based writer Benjamin Law calling for men to share how they will help tackle the culture of sexual harassment.
When Facebook removed positive posts from the news feeds of more than 680,000 users, those users made fewer positive posts and more negative ones. Similarly, when negative posts were removed, the opposite occurred.
The findings provide experimental evidence that emotions can be contagious, even without direct interaction or nonverbal cues, the researchers say.
"These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions," the authors wrote in the study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It has worked. Millions of women around the world have been expressing themselves and there has been an outpouring of painful recollections on Twitter and Facebook which have shed new light on how pervasive the problem really is.
Social Media hopefully has helped in some small way in therapeutically healing the millions of women who couldn't express themselves thus far.
Comments
Post a Comment