#MeToo Media Coverage Sympathetic to but Not Necessarily Empowering for Women

The #MeToo movement has encouraged women to share their personal stories of sexual harassment. While the movement amplifies previously unheard voices, a Carnegie Mellon University analysis of #MeToo media coverage shows accusers are often portrayed as sympathetic, but with less power and agency than their alleged perpetrators. "The goal of the movement is to empower women, but according to our computational analysis that's not what's happening in news stories," said Yulia Tsvetkov , assistant professor in the School of Computer Science's Language Technologies Institute. Tsvetkov's research team used natural language processing (NLP) techniques to analyze online media coverage of #MeToo narratives that included 27,602 articles in 1,576 outlets. In a paper published earlier this year, they also looked at how different media outlets portrayed perpetrators, and considered the role of third-party actors in news stories. "Bias can be unconscious, veiled and hidden in a seemingly positive narrative," Tsvetkov said. "Such subtle forms of biased language can be much harder to detect and to date we have no systematic way of identifying them automatically.