Why Focus On white Narratives?

Hello. My name is Castro Coby, and I'm going to

be talking about race and the Me Too movement, specifically

how social media shaped the narrative surrounding this hash tag.

Um looking at this from about three years out and

what that means for the future of this movement.

So, Me Too, began in 2000 and six to appropriate

to address the disproportionate sexual assault experiences in marginalized communities.

The hashtag, as we now know.

It, however, gained traction in 2016 by Alyssa Milano, and

it brought a conversation about sexual assault to the forefront

of cultural conversation and ushered in an age of accountability

for specifically white high profile celebrity women who came forward

about their experiences um with a certain producer.

Three years later, it's really clear that this movement centered

on white privileged celebrity spokespeople who neglected to meaningfully interact

with an intersectional understanding of sexual violence.

Um and looking at those critiques.

Um, I come to the conclusion that this has become

a white feminist movement.

And so a big part of my research is trying

to ask how how did social media interact with this.

So, I'm looking at factors that lead into hashtag visibility

and social media, how social media creates narratives that reshape

a movement, um looking at echo chambers and how they're

created within social media to solidify biases and cultural mythologies.

So, my number one research question is, does twitter's platform

focus on white women.

And before I get too far into my presentation, I

just want to address my own whiteness that I undeservedly

benefit from being a white woman and that it is

my intent within this research to address my own privilege

and power and address how they interact with this movement.

Um Yeah, yes.

So, within my literature review, I looked at a variety

of sources, but the main trajectory of what I read

was how the message constantly pushed by news coverage at

the height of me to was clearly that sexual assault

was a white woman issue, an individual issue.

It was not systematic.

It didn't really account for the many different types of

sexual assault that happens or what a power play it

is or how it Doesn't look like one kind of

thing. Um, and this is really underlined by a double

standard that happened in reception, where a lot of bipac

women got a lot of lash back.

Um, I mean, backlash, whoa, backlash and um what that

did is it legitimized one type of sexual assault in

a privileged group from all other types of sexual assault

situations that happen.

And it really blurred the conception of how race and

sex complicate each other and how women who are a

part of who are queer who are low income of

any type of matrix of being experience sexual assault differently

than these white privileged women.

Um, and in promoting white feminism's promotion over an intersectionality,

practice the Me Too movement denied how patriarchy oppresses women

past gender differences and inadvertently s centralizes white women victimization

as what this is.

And by doing that, it maintained a status quo around

sexual assault.

Um there's an indigenous feminist scholar named Sandy Ground who

talks about how she uses the term white streaming, and

it's to talk about how um focusing on new york

pain as a white woman basically makes it difficult for

you to do the intersectional work necessary to recognize how

you oppress other women and how patriarchy and white supremacy

are part of the tools that happen within sexual assault

and within gender differences.

Um and talking only about how gender interacts, denies how

many different ways that this interacts within our world.

So specifically looking at the research I did, I wanted

to find out how the hashtag was being used in

2021 and who had the loudest voice on the platform.

I looked at top tweets from January to March 2021

this year.

Um specifically looking under the Hashtag Metoo Hashtag and analyzing

what demographics were tweeting about what topic and what saturated

at least my feed.

Um I excluded replies and links.

I didn't want to get a lot of promotions and

I wanted to see how people originated conversations within this

movement. I was really focused less on people identifying um

Youtube discourse and more on how they're showing up to

the discourse.

Um and there's many limitations to this.

The first being this was pulled from my personal twitter

account that has a decade of data on me.

Um it knows I'm white, it knows I'm female, it

knows Eileen progressive and because this research is so focused

on addressing echo chambers and what comes up, I would

be admitted if I didn't talk about how the algorithm

organizes content based off of my identity and what it

knows about me.

So looking at this, I want to go forward with

the probability that the search results have been skewed for

my identity.

Um and to point out how at least on my

twitter feed as a white woman, I'm not really seeing

a lot of intersectional stories.

Um I also know account for incomplete snapshots.

This data is centered around account presentation largely looking at

profile pictures and bios to distinguish what demographic this was

coming from.

This means tweets that are anonymous aren't a part of

the data um and they're not really represented in a

distinct category.

Um I don't know why the rest of this slide

didn't quite load, but it also means that a lot

of the data collected doesn't really address gender or low

income or sexuality.

When I want to highlight it's dangerous to categorize race

and gender and sexuality and all these things is different,

all of these different types of being informed each other

and inform the kind of situations people will be placed

in. Um I also want to point out that only

looking at hashtag Metoo ignores a lot of other counter

me to communities that are formed that specifically talk about

violence experienced by women within marginalized communities during this time

hashtag we ourselves we started by burke, which is specifically

meant to be a hashtag that's not easily co opted

by white women for black women's sexual assault experiences.

So definitely skewed the data.

Um and what I found looking at this was that

um across the board white women were absolutely centered, as

like the dominant discourse within the twitter feed.

White women use the hashtag more and across the board

throughout every single month uh dominated the whole conversation.

So looking specifically at this one, um the collective data

through january and March of just this year, um it

clearly shows that female voices dominate the discourse.

Um White women made up about 46 of the hashtag

pretty consistently.

Um and twitter, at least through my search bar, focuses

on white women more than any other demographic.

Um so clearly white women's voices are amplified.

Um and I want to bring up that within this

research, I'm not seeking to discourage or discredit white women

from sharing their stories, but to highlight how white privilege

extends into a technological space.

Um I also want to raise the possibility that due

to the data on me that informed the search results,

I may be found so many different white voices because

I'm a white woman.

Um twitter search twitter organizes its search results, top tweets

latest tweets off of an algorithm that is based off

of the likelihood that you will want to see that

tweet. Um and I mentioned this within my analysis to

highlight how impossible objectivity is in the context of social

media. Um the social media sphere is not merely the

objective and even playing field that we believed it to

be when the hashtag feminism activism began, um even

Why Focus On white Narratives?

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