The Impact of #Metoo and #Timesup: The Usage of Affective Devices on
Twitter for the Purpose of Social Activism
MA Media Studies
New Media and Digital Culture
Po Ting Cheng | 11311207
June 2018
Supervisor: dr. T.J. (Tim) Highfield
Second reader: dr. S. (Stefania) Milan
Table of Contents
Abstract
3
1. Introduction
4
2. Literature Review and Theoretical Frameworks
8
2.1 Persuasion, and Its Functionality
8
2.1.1 A Review of Persuasion
8
2.1.2 A Review of Persuasive Technology
9
2.1.3 Persuasion and Twitter
10
2.2 Social Media Politics
10
2.2.1 An Introduction of Social Media Practices
10
2.2.2 Critical Perspectives on Social Media
12
2.3 How Social Media Practices are Able to Trigger Movements
13
2.3.1 Activism Driven by Social Media: A Review of Hashtags Usages
14
2.3.2 Feminist Activism on Social Media
15
2.4 An Overarching Perspective on Twitter and Users’ Behavior
17
3. Methodology
18
3.1 Case Study Selection Rationale
18
3.2 The Chosen Approach to Data Interpretation
20
3.3 Method of Analysis
21
4. Findings
22
4.1 Data Results
22
4.1.1 The Appearance of #Metoo and #Timesup
23
4.1.2 The Usage of Hashtags
24
4.1.3 The Usage of Retweets
26
4.2 Behavioral Analysis: Users’ Reactions on Twitter
28
4.3 Comparing the Persuasion Power of #Metoo and #Timesup
31
5. Discussion
32
6. Conclusion
35
7. References
37
Abstract
In recent years, social media has played an increasingly crucial role in providing a space for users to advocate ideologies: through organization, event promotion, cultural analysis, and general discussion of various issues, to further trigger social movements. The #Metoo movement is one of the most significant social movements in recent years, one that catches attention worldwide and is highly supported by celebrities. This thesis analyzes how the #Metoo and #Timesup movements escalated from trending hashtags to social movements and how they influence users, and motivate people from various backgrounds to unite for the sake of these movements. This thesis also addresses that Twitter, serving as a social media platform that reflects the real time event, offers an important exemplum of social media’s ability to foster a vibrant space for the advocacy of certain issues.
In this paper, I discuss the background stories of these two hashtags and distinguish the differences between them and other hashtags, as well as track the data from Twitter by means of DMI-TCAT in order to explain the results and their appearance in terms of the implementation of Twitter’s devices, and examine how they persuade. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the role of social media, in this case Twitter, in constructing forms of social movements with Twitter’s devices and features in the recent movements of #Metoo and #Timesup.
Through numeric as well as theoretical research, this study will contribute to provide another module of how social media, such as Twitter, represents as an important tool in generating social movements that are not easy to replicate.
1. Introduction
In October 2017, several female celebrities came out publicly to accuse Harvey Weinstein, an American mogul, of sexual harassment and assault. Right after the news exposure, the allegations of sexual abuse against Harvey Weinstein were revealed on social media. Among these celebrities was the American actress, Alyssa Milano. She was the first one to encourage people to use the hashtag #Metoo on their posts on social media in this wave of 2017, in order to reveal their personal experience of sexual harassment. The purpose of this was to show the public how serious and widespread this issue is, as it was rarely discussed before. To encourage people to reveal their personal experience, a hashtag (namely, #Metoo) was used as a tool. In its core, a hashtag is a tool that enables users to apply dynamic, user-generated tagging on their own content, as they can be created and freely composed. This makes it possible for other users to easily search for certain messages with a specific theme or content. If many people use certain hashtags, it significantly increases the visibility of a certain topic on social media.
The case of #Metoo is an example of how hashtags could really influence people’s lives: the usage of this hashtag became so widespread, that many women felt supported by what could be described as a certain “#Metoo-movement”. Due to this momental support, many women decided to come forward with their own stories; not only in the entertainment industry, but also in politics. In some cases, women even turned against their own superiors. Within a day, the hashtag #Metoo showed up more than 200,000 times on Twitter with 300,000 more posts associated with #Metoo day after Alyssa Milano’s post. Furthermore, not only did the #Metoo hashtag go viral nationally, but also internationally, as there were even French or Spanish version of the hashtag, such as #PasMoi (Lekach 2017). Moreover, at least 45% of Facebook users in the US have at least one friend who mentioned the hashtag #Metoo in their post (Facebook).
The many consequences of the Weinstein’s case led to a global trend that could be called the “Weinstein effect” (Stelter 2017), which entails that many women in all kinds of sectors come forward to accuse famous and/or powerful men of sexual misconduct. This term has been used by several newspaper publishers, such as CNN.com, or BBC.com., to reveal sexual assault allegations levied towards many political figures; triggered by Harvey Weinstein's sexual harassment allegations (Kantor, Twohey 2017). The “Weinstein effect” has also led to numerous organized movements, one of which is known as the Time’s Up movement. This movement, which was launched on 1 January 2018, aims to specifically expose the existence of gender inequality and sexual harassment in Hollywood. As Pirani described, a couple months later, in the article What is #TIMESUP? New movement tackles sexual harassment with legal support:
“More than 300 leading women in Hollywood published a letter unveiling the movement in the New York Times. The ‘anti-harassment action plan’ was formed soon after the Harvey Weinstein news and is a direct response to the #MeToo movement that sparked a national conversation around sexual harassment and assault and the ousting of prominent men accused of such acts across multiple industries.” (Pirani 2018)
“Time’s Up is an unified call for change from women in entertainment for women everywhere. From movie sets to farm fields to boardrooms alike, envisioning nationwide leadership that reflects the world in which we live” (Times Up, 2017).
The slogan of this association is widely used by both male and female celebrities in order to protest against the phenomenon, which can be easily seen on social media such as Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram (Nina Dobrev, Instagram, 2017, Emma Waston, Instagram 2017), representing the empowerment and encouragement of female self-awareness and addressing the systemic inequality and injustice in the workplace that have kept underrepresented groups from reaching their full potential (Time’s Up, 2017). Meanwhile, #Timesup was seen by users on social media after its exposure. During the Golden Globe Awards 2018, where the idea of Time’s Up appeared publicly as an actual protest in terms of people gathering together to propose something; attendances wore black and pins with texts such as: Time’s Up, to protest against sexual harassment and gender inequality in workplace often seen in Hollywood’s the entertainment industry. During the event, influential people, such as actresses or athletes, showed their critique publicly, and caught the publics’ attention.
However, this is not the first time that an online activity turns out as an actual on ground movement. Scholars have been doing research on this topic for years, mainly emphasizing how social media serves as a tool for activists in approaching their ideologies. For example, Paolo Gerbaudo, a political sociologist, concludes that the utility of social media could lead to social movements with his research of different types of social media activists. In other words, he states that social media works as a platform which supports users to become activists in the Occupy Wall Street case (68). Also, it is anticipated that with the politics of media, 1
“media activism will surely play a crucial role in the emerging social formation” (100). Here, activism is explained as an action or practice of using campaigning to bring about political or social change by a group of like-minded individuals (Harlow 4), which is mainly used as a description of offline activism, yet, online activism, is an action that allows enhancing offline activism, with the usage of internet, such as adding email campaigns or sharing posts, in order to facilitate social movements (Harlow 5). It is shown in the study that social media also plays a role in contributing to social movements, such as Black Lives Matters , which was 2
transitioned from tweet debates to action in reality (Murthy 2). Obviously, this time with the case of #Metoo, it is revealed that the incidents have been hidden for a while, which at the same time, brings a sense of togetherness between certain individuals. It also signifies that some key hashtags have the potential to nudge and even change the perspectives of people. This was also the underlying idea of #Metoo, since it embraces the idea that survivors of sexual abuse can change society for the better by sharing their stories.
The hashtags #Metoo and #Timesup are the central study-objects of this research, since they are distinguishable from other hashtags that have potential to trigger social movements for the following
A protest movement that against economic inequality worldwide, which took place on September 17, 2011, in New
1
York City's Wall Street financial district. It received global attention and led to a surge in the movement (Occupy Wall Street 2016).
A movement that stands for black lives matter, a movement that campaigns against violence and systemic racism
2
toward black people. This movement caught attention around the world and the hashtag,#blacklivesmatter , has been used 41 Million times since its first appearance. This movement is defined as the most unified community by the research of Freelon. (Blacklivesmatter 2018, Freelon 10)
reasons: (1) The spread of #Metoo stands for the onset of the action against sexual assault, and #Timesup stands for the actual activity that was derived from #Metoo, which was originally an online action, and reached a much larger audience than only Twitter users; (2) By examining other popular hashtags that are also relevant to social movements, such as #blacklivesmatters, who serve as representatives for a group of certain people. Furthermore, #Metoo not only generates togetherness, but also symbolizes encouragement from people with various backgrounds, such as celebrities, as this action requires courage. Also, this action is more often copied by users when more celebrities were involved, e.g., the case of Gwyneth Paltrow . 3
However, this phenomenon was not seen in the case of Black Lives Matter, as this protest was initiated by normal users, supported by celebrities and turned into a movement afterwards; (3) According to the research from George Washington University, it is stated that the conversations with #Metoo appeared to be highly relevant to the issue, meaning that the “volume” and “reach” stand out from other sexual harassment topics on Twitter since 2010 (Ohlheiser 2018).
That being said, in an era full of news, when people are easily distracted due to other issues or lose focus on certain topics, #MeToo made itself as a movement on social media. And, (4) as a result, #Metoo addresses a particular value among people. This is because it was promoted by the public in the form of retweeting, and hence initiated a solid and stronger conversation that generated other related hashtags to symbolize the issue, i.e.#YesAllWomen , #WhatWereYouWearing , and create another movement of Time’s 4 5
Up (#Timesup), as a further activity that was seen publicly. Likewise, it can be interpreted that these two hashtags did not literally represent the value of their contents, yet, one is inspired by another with users’ reactions and developed into a social movement. This can be viewed as a domino effect generated by social media via its politics by users, which can be distinguished from other hashtags that matter to activism, because it is seen as a series of related events occurring as a direct and inevitable result of one initial event (The Free Dictionary 2014).
By observing these developing phenomena, I am curious about the way that social media influences people by means of persuasive techniques. It is seen that both functions apply the technique of persuasion, as long as they alter human behavior. B.J Fogg, a behavior scientist at Stanford University states the term of
persuasive technology: meaning that computing system enables nudging/influencing human decisions (Fogg
1). At the same time, his Research Lab at the university provides several researches examples to prove that persuasive technology does influence users. These include the method users react to online shopping, which include a deeper lens of the design, interface, and other analysis. In this paper, I propose to use his scope to observe the politics of Twitter and examine how his theory defines politics of Twitters persuasive markers. In response to these developing phenomena, I am motivated to explore how users influence each other with hashtags via social media. Furthermore, I will analyze to what extend social media share certain aspects of persuasion, and further influence events to occur in reality. To be specific, I will use Twitter as a
Gwyneth Paltrow, a Hollywood actress who claimed assaulted by Harvey Weinstein. (Kantor, Abrams 2017)
3
A Twitter hashtag that users share examples or stories of misogyny and violence against women on social media
4
(Medina 2014).
An exhibition that features stories of sexual violence, and displays what the victims wear at the time they encounter
5
sexual assault (Vagianos 2017). Here, it is used to indicate and promote awareness that the outfits of victim has nothing to do with sexual assault.
representative example of modern social media due to its popularity and its nature as an interactive micro-blogging as it has the most traffic and engagement from the general public. I will also specifically examine several influential and popular posts retrieved from the set time frame, examining the information of 1,000 random selected posts and reactions of users, as well as the themes of the content, e.g whether the messages are shared in order to share personal experiences, support others or protest. Next, I will utilize the analyzing tool DMI-TCAT to reveal the trend of the popularity of contents which are relevant in the context of #Metoo and #Timesup. That being said, I will use the data result to visualize the appearance of this content and analyze to what extend the behavior of users is influenced. With these results and appropriate analysis I will strive to answer the following research questions:
1) How do users employ hashtags and other affective devices on Twitter, such as retweets, for the purposes of social activism?
2) How do hashtags like #MeToo and #TimesUp act as persuasive markers for social movements?
Here, an affective device is addressed as a device that contains the implementation of affect. According to the research of Zizi Papacharissi, professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois, Chicago, the understanding of “affect” is defined as: “a form of pre-emotive intensity subjectively experienced and connected to, in this context, to processes of premediation or anticipation of events prior to their occurrence” (311). Hence, “affect” allows users to predict the consequence of the release of information when messages are shared with the expressed emotions, which are in turn based on the experience. With a deeper scope, it is explained that affect does not stand for emotions, yet, it is something intense that is generated when people experience emotions (316).
For instance, some people would feel angry when they encounter protests even though they have not cognitively processed the exact information of the issue. With her research, it is shown that affect is able to reinforce and drive movements (318), since it seeks to emphasize the emotive influence on decisions and interactions (Barnard 5) Furthermore, according to her study, in the cases of Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, it is revealed that affect encourages online engagement, and has the potential to push users in participating in online conversation, hence becoming further activists. She argues that when the content is affective, it increases users’ engagement in political conversations, which would be beneficial for activist movements (Papacharissi 50). Thus, I aim to apply this theory to the politics of Twitter, meaning that the devices on Twitter, such as hashtags, own the capability of evoking users’ affect and consequently propose further effect, such as a social movement.
On the other hand, a persuasive marker is defined as a sign that enables execute persuasion, namely, a symbol that allows it to influence or change others’ thought and behavior when it is seen, The next section will aim to explain the theory of persuasion. The goal of this thesis is to examine the usage of social media, and how the users are engaged with the real-time events in terms of how it leads to activism, as well as how it works to persuade others. Interestingly, it has also been shown that Twitter searches during crisis are more active than Google (Caminos 17). To this end, I emphasize that content gathered from posts within the time frame: from October 1, 2017, to March 31, 2018, for #Metoo and #Timesup, as well as the examination of #Metoo and #Timesup. Namely, the time when #Metoo started to gain attention until it turned into a public
pretest for celebrities on Golden Globe Award 2018, and when 700,000 female farmworkers signed a letter of solidarity, saying they stand with Hollywood actors against sexual harassment, until the foundation of #Timesup was initiated and to the Academy Award, where influential people showed their critiques on stage. Furthermore, I will analyze how social media reinforces particular ideas within real-time events and its implementation while bringing out the theory of persuasion.
2. Literature Review and Theoretical Frameworks
In this section, I will introduce related literature that contextualizes the existing academic corpus to analyze and introduce the politics of social media and draw the relation between social media and users’ behaviors with researching literatures. In the following definitions, I will highlight and explain the influence of the social media platform on social movements and address further implementations. Finally, I will draw further comparisons between media and persuasion.
2.1 Persuasion, and Its Functionality
Here, I will introduce the content of persuasion and apply it to Fogg’s statements from in his cases and how persuasion works on people or users when digital media is involved.
2.1.1 A Review of Persuasion
Persuasion is defined as a communicative process that influences others, while the persuadee is not aware of it (Jowett, O’Donnell 31). To be more precise, persuasion is explained as a process where senders and receivers shared common symbols, through which the persuader tries to affect the audiences to adopt a change in a given attitude or behavior (32). Here, persuasion works as a method that satisfies both persuader and persuadee while conveying messages and information. As mentioned in the introduction, I will use this scope to define “persuasive marker" in terms of the signs that allow convince people, as well as satisfying two parties, e.g., persuaders and persuadees. That is, a persuasive marker will be able to change the way people think or influence their opinions and their behavior will be altered.
The politics of persuasion works when both the needs of persuader and persuadee are satisfied, in other words, both parties are dependent on one another for interactive transactions. Persuaders use different methods to approach receivers’ response, including educating, or even threatening. Additionally, establishing values is another function of persuasion, for example, conveying the concept of what is good and bad, right or wrong (35). After addressing values, a persuader can use the audiences’ respond to generate attitude, which is used as an anchor to promote his or her idea. Moreover, a persuader can shape users’ attitude into a behavior, which works as a motivational strategy toward the public relation. For example, people use less paper cups because they are convinced that it helps improve the quality of environment (37). At the same time, according to the research of Beasley and Danesi, it was found that advertisement serves as a good example of persuasion (2). Namely, by using several materials, such as brand names or logos, advertisements are able to convey extra messages beside the product itself and influence other people’s ideas (50). For instance, a product with a logo of trees would be considered to be produced eco-friendly, thus will trigger people to choose it if they are interested in eco-friendly products. Here, #Metoo and #Timesup are seen persuasive markers that contain a certain meaning that goes beyond the words. These messages represent additional messages, such as anti-sexual assault ones, when they are added to the Tweets. By including what
is mentioned above, a resonance is established, that is; persuasion motivates the receivers to accept the purpose of the persuader.
2.1.2 A Review of Persuasive Technology
In this section, I will introduce Fogg’s studies of how persuasion is utilized within modern technology. With various research and studies, he proposes the term of persuasive technology, indicating that computers are originally designed for analyzing and increasing productivity at workplaces. Yet, with the utility of internet, the computing system has turned itself into a technology that affects and/or motivates users’ behavior and/or decisions (1). Here, he provides the example of the design of how online newspaper try to convince their readers to provide their personal information while signing up for a free subscription of the newspaper (2). Likewise, for other technology, such as Google map, people follow the instruction of the device instead of figuring out their own routes. Moreover, according to the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, computers are allowed to change people’s thoughts and behaviors in predictable ways, as is stated by his research that applies methods from experimental psychology (Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab 2018). Furthermore, when Twitter is used as a specific researching subject, it becomes clear that Twitter is popular because its three main implementations: motivation, ability and trigger. All of these apply to Fogg’s theory of behavior model for persuasive design. That being said, Twitter is designed to be used in a simple manner as it offers “hot triggers”, known share button on web pages. As a result, it gains popularity and works persuasively among users (Cheng 2010). Also, he explained that via the internet, the implementation of the web is usually invisible, in other words, users are often not aware that these technologies are influencing their behaviors. With the aspect of computer being a persuasive social actor, it is indicated that “human beings are hardwired to respond to cues in the environment, especially to things that seem alive in some way”(89). Additionally, what is provided online to the users reveals that the function of persuading alters the behaviors of users via media content.
On the other hand, with the aspect of human behavior, he creates a module to illustrate behavior design, which stands for the idea that persuasion is not just an over-hyped technique, but a language that propels clear behavioral changes. Fogg, integrating psychology and media, reveals that instead of providing motivation and simplicity, such as the usage of Twitter, matters more when it comes to influencing people. He also claimed that people tend to respond in social ways when they perceive social presence, such as feeling empathic or angry or emotions of the like. For instance, contents online are able to trigger automatic responses in people (89-90). For example, users tend to use a specific filter provided from social media for their profile photos, or hashtags to reveal their attitude toward something. One such a hashtag is #prayforparis, showing users’ sympathy toward the terrorist attack in Paris in 2015 (BBC 2015). There are three main factors that affect users’ behaviors according to the research of Fogg: tools, social actors and medium (90). He states that psychological cues, which can be simple and convey empathy or any other emotions, are able to push people to infer that these technologies own emotions. Thus, it can be deduced that persuasive technology is able to convince people when it shows its affiliation to particular users. For example, female users tend to react or share posts that support feminism more often than male users. It reveals that people are likely to be persuaded by contents that show similarity or familiarity to themselves (94).
The statement “hot triggers change people”, means that instead of the information itself, the way users can react to a message is the key to influencing a user’s’ behavior. Lastly, when people get used to the proactiveness of these methods, the technology is proving to be persuasive (Fogg 2017). In his paper, he concludes that technology can be designed to change people’s mind. Here, the function of Twitter is designed to be used easy and catchy, which encourages people to spend excessive amounts of time on it (Alter, 2017) (Twitter 2018). At the same time, as is mentioned above, using hashtags helps people feel a sense of togetherness, which motivates people to copy or imitate each other’s behavior in terms of persuading. Moreover, Fogg mentions the idea of social cue in his research of Persuasive Technology, stating that “social cue is another key that changes people’s behavior. It is indicated that people would be more responsive to information that are more relevant to themselves” (106-108). It explains why users tend to seek out messages that have similar views and values, and further promotes their voice or value through sharing and liking similar posts. As persuasive technology makes human naturally tend towards contents that convey messages with emotions, it also motivates users to be more active with the given information. At the same time, the usage of language and/or symbols, also influence users’ behavior, including hashtags (101). Hence, I anticipate that the retweet function on Twitter, especially in the cases that are relevant to social movements, serves as a tool to motivate activists to take actions.
2.1.3 Persuasion and Twitter
In the last paragraph, I explained that Twitter, when it works as a persuasive technology, can influence users behavior. In this paragraph, I aim to examine how Twitter uses its functions to apply social dynamics in order to persuade users with a deeper scope. According to the research of Fogg in A Behavior Model for
Persuasive Design, it is shown that in a certain perspective, this technology applies the design to persuade
people. He provides the theory of the module, which includes three factors that change people’s behavior, resulting in persuasion. The understanding of the model helps explains how people are persuaded by technology, and further confirms the results in his findings. As mentioned above, there are three factors that work as influential elements; (1) sufficient motivation, (2) the ability to perform the behavior, and (3) the encouragement to perform the behavior. In his behavior model, it is concluded that one of the main functions of persuasive technology is to bring up togetherness among people. From analysis, it was found that these phenomena result from several factors, such as the ability to make users feel better about themselves and generate a better mood. Also, the sense of togetherness makes people feel more powerful and approved, for example: their behavior is agreed on by the majority of the people. Meanwhile, it increases the engagement of online interaction, which could result in gaining the users’ willingness to become involved in computer and social media again. In other words, these qualities connect people to computers more and lead to the theory that “computing technology can apply social dynamics to convey social presence and to persuade” (104).
2.2 Social Media Politics
In the following section, I aim to introduce the politics of social media, using Twitter as an example, and draw further relations between social media and how it works as persuasive technology.
Social media serves as a web-based technology that is approachable for users to share information and ideas via computers or mobile devices. With the features availably for sharing information in public together with its high accessibility, virtual communities and networks for users are created. Microblogging , which is a 6
technique used by Twitter, serves as a type of social media, and is a new form of communication through which users can describe their current status in short posts distributed by instant messages, mobile phones, email or the Web (Kwak et. al 2010). This is a relatively new phenomenon defined as “A form of blogging that lets users write brief text updates about their lives on the go and send them to friends and interested observers via text messaging, instant messaging (IM), email or the web” (Java et, al 56). Unlike usual blogging, it is short, brief and allows users to communicate with others with the lower investment of time. Ranging from sharing messages to creating a live stream of current issues, the utility of Twitter surely increase engagement among the users.
There are several features presented by Twitter. Several examples will be stated below. By subscribing to other users, also known as following, users are allowed to follow up and be engaged in the conversation that they are interested or involved in. By posting information in various forms, such as texts, images or short clips, known as tweeting, registered users are able to share ideas in public. In this way, other users are able to see the posts and react to them, such as liking, sharing or commenting. The function of sharing other posts is also called retweeting, serving as a re-post of a tweet, which allows users to repost the information they notice and gain more attention and engagement among other users. This generates immense amounts of traffic on Twitter. Simply put, it is a user-centered site that enables users to establish communal dialogues (Van Dijck 71), which increase the visibility of the content in public.
Meanwhile, the feature of hashtags is also introduced by Twitter. It is used to index keywords or certain topics, which allows users to follow or search for certain topics in an easier way. It is written with a hashtag sign, the symbol of #, in order to label the category of the posts. Also, hashtags allow users to see any other public Tweets that includes that hashtag, and to trend certain topics either actively or passively. This function also generates “trending topics” by assembling popular topics together via indexing and filtering, before it is noticeable to users (Twitter 2018). Whilst Twitter creates trends with the utilization of hashtags, this function is also used for different purposes, such as event promotions, sports events and purchasing. On other social media platforms, such as Instagram and Facebook, hashtags are also used to express users’ perspective toward specific events or issues. For example, #prayforparis, which shows users’ concern about the attacking event in Paris in 2015. Sometimes, hashtags further trigger users to advocate or protest certain issues. In other words, hashtags actually play a certain role that influence people or users’ behaviors, decisions, and perspectives.
The implementation of this function enables users to focus on certain posts or contents in an easier way, as well as generating bigger data in particular topics. When it comes to the usage of Twitter, it is claimed that it works as a platform that empowers the voice of people and supports group ideas to gain attention (Van Dijck73). It also functions as a tool for political campaigns and protests, education, public relations, and so forth. With its filter function, Twitter is capable of routing ideas and manipulating opinions, with its algorithm, for example, posts of politicians and celebrities own higher accessibility and visibility
A further development of blog, allowing one show one to share short message in public and other users are able to
6
than regular ones because Twitter distributes content with greater influence on top of searching results (74). For example, Ellen DeGeneres’ post of a selfie during Oscar in 2014 was ranked as the top Tweet in history 7
until the Tweet by Carter Wilkerson appeared in 2017 (Twitter 2018). As a result, it is concluded that Tweets 8
of highly followed accounts with added features, such as hashtags, are seen more easily. With the aspect of self-promoting, Twitter is seen as a medium that allows it to manage and keep its users attached to this platform, by boosting contents, such as political campaigns. Thus, it can be deduced that users are more willing to use Twitter as a tool in order to pass by messages. That being said, with the flow that Twitter creates, users’ behaviors are shaped and reconstructed, for instance, utilizing hashtags or following trend topics to approach higher engagements, and vice versa.
2.2.2 Critical Perspectives on Social Media
Fuchs, a professor of University of Westminster, states that Twitter’s algorithms lead to asymmetric visibility: users who are higher active are able to implement the shape of the Twitter’s feed. Thus, political issues are influenced by the implementation of users’ behaviors, such as the mention of @ or hashtags, that leads to the result of online activism and revolution, for instance the Egyptian Revolution in 2011. In other words, politically, social media is not the reason that causes or lead to protests or social events, but with its contradictory character, it stands for the medium that combines ideologies, actions, and attitudes (205-207).
At the same time, Gerbaudo’s research states that “modern media have always constituted a channel through which social movements not only communicate, but also organize their actions and mobilize their constituencies (4)”. Or precisely, he states that social media is a contemporary equivalent of what traditional media, e.g newspaper or posters were for the labor movements, such as Wall Street Occupy in 2011. They are not only used to convey concepts, but also to shape images of what people come together and act together, to generate collective action (4). With this aspect, it shows that what social media represents, is capable of speaking for thoughts of the users, individually or collectively. This statement is also supported by Shirky, who argues that social media is a new tool for enabling new forms of group formation (37-40). As a result, it can be explained that the actions, infrastructures, and interactions on social media are potential possibilities that create collective action. Gerbaudo also points out that media contributes to the process of social movements, as a reflection of their “personal” orientation (9), and further raise the possibility of activism. Here, he analyzed the movements of Egyptian Uprising, the Spanish Indignados and Wall Street Occupy as example to explain the implementation of social media, such as Twitter, to social actions. He points out that social media connects users across distance and creates a symbolic construction and trending place in a public space, as long as the message is appealing to the majority of population and conveying a concept of collective consciousness. In this way, the collective consciousness will turn into emotional sense, and further build up togetherness among individuals.
Another explanation is provided by the investigation of Gerbaudo. He concluded that due to the innovation of contemporary social media and its accessibility, activists are allowed to characterize
A selfie from Ellen DeGeneres with other celebrities, which was took in Academy Awards in 2014. It owns 2.37
7
million likes and was retweeted 3.3 million times. It was the top tweet until 2017 (Twitter 2018).
Carter Wilkerson had a post requesting retweets in order to get nuggets, which gained more than 3,470,000 retweets
8
themselves via so called new forms of collective action and thus turn social movements leaderless, horizontal, and spontaneous, according to the case studies of contemporary activist, Laurie Penny, a columnist of New Statesman. Furthermore, Gerbaudo states that social media works as a role that helps mobilization, which “involves a process of gathering or assembling of individuals and groups around something they share in common” (19-20), and thus triggers social movements. On the other hand, Davis mentioned the “fear of crowds” and made the point that this term makes the process of gathering more problematic and complicated, especially when there are symbols and technological mediations involved (21). Meanwhile, he states that formal organizational structure is found to be weak in social media, hence, it is usually the form of communication that constructs a collective action, and the forms of communication is responsible for “setting the scene” for its display. Here, social media particularly, is characterized by a high degree of interactivity, and by a focus on user-generated content. Otherwise speaking, users establish communicative interactions as producers themselves, and with the implementation of social media, the users are able to construct the type or flow of the content on cyberspace . This critique reveals that social media 9
works as a tool that involves participatory culture form the users (22). Finally, Twitter provides a format that represents relation between users and text, with the usage of hashtags that combines “#” symbol followed by words. Whilst hashtags are designed to be searchable on the Twitter system, they connect tweets form those who are not subscribed to certain users. It is seen that users can use and introduce hashtags, in order to increase their variety and visibility.
It is not hard to say that the features of social media stand for libertarian and participatory culture. It stimulates the networking between people and leads them to new social movements. Namely, social media serves as a new way of doing politics with the function of networking (23), which works openly and horizontally. Collective action is one of the main elements that results in social movements. Usually, there is an activist playing a role who influences an internal organization for social movements, whilst here, in social media, the leadership is obscure and cannot be explained by leadership that is replaced by collective images, or “forms of action, and organization” as the reason of unity, which leads to directions (43). Gerbaudo mentioned that “Social media like Facebook and Twitter contributed to transforming individual sentiments of anger into a collective identity animated by a desire to take back the streets after years of demobilization (77).” Here, emotional motivations towards social movements are pulled together by Twitter while it triggers people’s enthusiasm and drives a contagious sense of anticipation. With a deeper observation, Twitter, is mainly used as a tool for “live” internal coordination within activist groups, including as a method for citizen and journalists to document injustice in society (135). While Twitter plays a part that brings up social movements, in the next chapter, I will analyze a few examples to address Twitters’ implementation in the following chapter.
2.3 How Social Media Practices are Able to Trigger Movements
Whilst social media alters the structure of social relation, one of the main issues that lead to social movements is the function of assembling. It is claimed that the logic of gathering brings individuals with different background together and triggers movements (36). Here, I will address examples of events that
Defined as a notional environment where communication over computer networks occurs (Oxford Dictionaries). Here,
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happened on social media and compare those incidents with their influences, involvements and implementations.
2.3.1 Activism Driven by Social Media: A Review of Hashtags Usages
As mentioned, one of the most significant feature on Twitter is the function of hashtags on social media. Hashtags are designated by a ‘hash' symbol (#), working as keywords that label information that describes a tweet or post in searching. With millions of tweets per day, hashtags play the role of organizing information on Twitter, and even assembles/categorizes certain content (Small 1). It also allows users to apply dynamic, user-generated tagging on their contents and which makes it possible for other users to look up for certain messages in a simpler manner with a specific theme or content. Functionally speaking, hashtags serve as a tool that helps generate "Trending Topics”, when a hashtag becomes popular on the feed page. For instance, when particular topics are hyped by users, such as raising awareness for gender equality in workplace, people use #Metoo as a “symbol” to contain the whole idea of the topic, instead of adding hashtags before each word. Thus, it reveals that hashtags are also used to express context around a given message. Hashtags are widely used, even cross media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. They are also utilized in various fields, for example in: media broadcasting, purchasing, event promotion, complaints, sentiment analysis, and complaints. In this essay, I will highlight event promotion and sentiment analysis, which focuses on the field of my research questions. Since hashtags organize discussion around specific topics or events, I aim to explain and address this flow with a review of Hashtagpolitics (Rambukkana 2014), a collection of the investigation of politics of hashtags.
According to the research of Rambukkana, the politics of hashtags has the “potential to organize new structures of discussion, when we see beyond Twitter” (Zappavigna 803), as well as the new “potential discourse communities” (801). Hashtags work as a tool that helps classify information when they serve as “text and metatext, information and tag, pragmatic and metapragmatic speech (Rambukkana 30)”. He also claims that hashtags own the capability of marking discursive flows of events. Previous studies have shown that hashtags implement on conversation evolving on Twitter, especially temporally events (31). That is to say that, hashtags can also be observed as a function that encourages the discussion about the #Metoo issue. Besides being a device that supports increasing the visibility of discussion, hashtags also plays a major role in activism. In Rambukkana’s research of #Ferguson , it is shown that whilst hashtags themselves are 10
neutral, meaning that they do not suggest anything originally, they imply the background story of the issue and carry out the function of advertising while operated by users (40). The space in which hashtags exist is defined as powerful and effective. This is especially seen when it allows users to use this technique for “drawing together and separating, calling out and memorializing”, meaning that hashtags help facilitate a new sphere of human interaction (39). For activists, hashtags support rising the awareness of public issues among users. This phenomenon shows that hashtags provide source for people to reach the information in an easier way. Although conflicts could happen while using hashtags, because of the misusing from the public, hashtags indeed stand out for their implementation on self-consciousness and prominence of the activists, as well as their potential impact for public issues and or event organizing (43).
The incident involved protests and riots that began the day after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by white police
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While explaining that hashtags on Twitter boost the strength of particular issue in public, it is also shows that hashtags bring people with a similar concern together (2). Retweeting (RT) can be observed as an action of supporting the issue and bringing people together, as long as it established inter-network. According to the research of Veenstra, et.al, social movements are highly relevant to collective actions (89). In social movements, hashtags categorize the supporters and opponents of the event, and RT reinforces the relationship of each group. Whilst a retweet “does not necessarily indicate endorsement of another’s original tweet but does provide a concrete connection between the two that can be seen as part of a new, informal protest information network”, it provides a modern way for users to apply the model of movement mobilization (90). Because Twitter serves as a platform for real-time information sharing, it can be explained that it generates a network through which users, or activists, are able to post messages to show their opinions and stay connected to others, with the function of retweet and hashtags. It is also indicated that these approaches accelerate gatherings the view of the public, yet the atmosphere mostly happens fast but also disappears fast. In this case, it is illustrated that the social movement #Metoo and #Timesup originate through the implementation of the politics of Twitter. The researchers also reveal that Twitter users are more engaged with the event and become active participants in it. While at the same time, it provides extra exposure of the incidents to individuals who are not concerned about the issue in the beginning (98). In other words, when a message is turning from a personal idea to an omnipresent idea among the public, retweets and hashtags perform an essential part on social media when it actually turns into a social movement.
Interestingly, Gerbaudo highlights another aspect of the argument. In his research, it is revealed that while social media assembles certain people, it only captures importance during the phase of keeping the movement appealing, as well as creates a scene that attract the occupations “and to invoke a sense of solidarity between physical occupiers and internet occupiers, activists on the ground and people following events from a distance (Gerbaudo 103). Moreover, with his research on the case of Wall Street Occupation, social media owns the potential to turn slacktivists into activists, which applies to the argument that social 11
media, for example, Twitter works as a tool that accelerate the establishment of social movements such as #Metoo, while the implementation of hashtags catches people’s attention in a more effective way. His argument focusses on the participation of people. It is revealed that hashtags on Twitter create a sense of anticipation among uses. Furthermore, the space that is offered by Twitter serves as a key website for the movement launching before its appears in public space (114). However, he also makes the point that the influence of hashtags on social movement is temporary, as it catches the attention of the public at the beginning but disappears rapidly with the flow. After all, hashtags are not designed to create an emotional connection to the public (115). He states that activists invest much more energy on Twitter itself, yet the results are ineffective in terms of social movements; it did not maintain the enthusiasm of protesters, and sometimes, trend topics are not even created by hashtags on Twitter. However, while using hashtags, it enables turning the public’s attentions towards social movements (118).
2.3.2 Feminist Activism on Social Media
A term that combines the words "slacker" and "activism" to refer to simple measures used to support an issue or
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In this section, I will analyze the specific behavior of users on social media platforms, in order to examine the ways in which ideology is inscribed and re-inscribed in interactive Internet communities, that further triggers social movements. In this section, it begins to test my hypothesis of social media forms that support the production and reproduction of social movements (via Internet).
Ample research has been dedicated to the capacity of the Internet to encourage feminist activism. Julia Schuster considered the evolution of Internet an interactive platform for users to share information in several forms, such as videos on Facebook or photos on Twitter (10). Social media platforms make it possible for particular people to become newly interested in activist causes (15). Extending this logic to specific communities geared towards women and women’s issues, this constitutes evidence that social media platforms provide a space that is conducive to the promotion of feminist politics (16). For example, issues of gender equality are promoted on feminist blogs or their Facebook pages while other users are capable of participating the discussion. In other words, they can leave comments, share critiques and produce their “public selves” in terms of online communities (Schuster 17).
Social media thus reinforces beliefs already held by users who actively seek out contents, but it also plays a role in influencing the attitudes of people who were otherwise not invested in the particular form of politics being promoted by a particular online community. For example, the Women's March in Washington on January 21, 2017, was a Facebook event created to protest against Donald Trump (Facebook). According to The Washington Post, the march was originally an idea of a retired attorney, who was angry about the result of the 2016 presidential election and turned to social media as an outlet of her views. She published a post on a pro-Hillary Clinton “Pantsuit Nation” Facebook page saying that a pro-women march was needed to express outrage against Donald Trump. The post caught the public’s attention and was promoted by an increasingly massive base of supporters. The Facebook event became a national phenomenon and more than one million participants gathered not only in Washington, DC, but also in major cities across the United States to demonstrate on President Trump’s Inauguration Day. This progression of events is seen as evidence that a single post on Facebook can result in a huge event and a highly effective engine of collective action (Stein).
As a direct result of these phenomena, the political and professional aspirations of women can be influenced by the Internet’s role in spreading ideologies. Keller identifies the potential of the empowerment of feminism in social media in this particular respect. As she states in “Virtual Feminisms,” women-centric networking produces a real potential for girls to develop interest in careers in marketing and politics, which historically are fields that have been dominated by men. By extending the idea that “blogging empowers ideologies” (Harris 475–484), Keller emphasizes that the communities of feminist activists lie between the mainstream and a subcultural social movement space, because these communities represent new directions in activism by advocating their own ideas (432). She claims that online activities could be seen as a formative engine of subculture, which provides young female users with the space to reframe feminist activism with their own experiences (435). Thus, feminist activism has a mutually constitutive relationship with the very act of participation in online media; a space in which feminism itself is defined and redefined collectively through debate and multifaceted interaction.
These media forms thus establish communities and creates global networks in which feminist information can be spread through multiple forms of discourse (443). Moreover, these social media spaces allow the potential of feminist politics to be spread through the promotion of positive role models for young
women. However, these role models function differently from their role in traditional media forms because of the element of interaction. According to the study of Hande Eslen-Ziya, social media provides an alternative to traditional forms of communication and presents new public spheres, while also strengthening the networking between the participants by more engaged discussions (Lister et al. 176). In other words, as long as viewers become participants, communities are able to solidify (van Zoonen 474). One specific example of the interactive element of community building on social media is the hashtag. As Loza demonstrates, certain hashtags on the internet dilute the otherwise radical aims of feminism, while simultaneously promoting a particular form of liberal feminism that has grown in the age of the Internet. In other words, the capacity for “mere” online interaction to promote a radical politics is certainly a contentious issue. However, it suffices to say that the liberalized form of feminism implicit in the use of hashtags is nonetheless a positive development which has the potential to promote a certain form of feminism, despite its potential conflicts with more radical forms of activism. One of the tensions implicit in this framework is the question of how and to what extent a mainstream social media platform can serve as a space for activist politics in general, and feminist politics in particular, to flourish.
A proper analysis of media forms and the interactions and politics they engender requires an analysis of the relationship between a media environment and the content that spreads in such an environment. In other words, the social media platform serves as an infrastructure for communication, and the shape and features of that infrastructure play a formative role in the type of interactions and politics that are more likely to take place. As James J. Gibson states in his theory of visual perception, a media environment provides animals (including human beings) “affordances,” which may or may not be beneficial for certain activities (128). Extending the descriptions of social media above, it can be deduced that Facebook serves as a space for “affordances” because it is considered the most popular social media platform for the users. Namely, Twitter conforms to the original meaning of the concept of “affordances” because it allows users to send and to read messages, which are called "tweets". Gibson also says that the environment remains the same despite some modifications that are made by human beings (130). In order to reach a greater number of users, and hereby fitting the growing demand of requirements by the users, multiple affordances are offered.
As stated previously, the way people perceive information, is shifted, influenced, and reshaped by the social media on the Internet, including Twitter. Most notably, while people used to receive information and had their opinions shaped by older forms of media that required only passive interaction (e.g., reading a magazine), social media platforms allow for a mode of democratic engagement that includes interaction and debate with other users on the platform. In other words, the actions of following particular subjects, re-tweeting or liking a post, are seen as taking a stand for certain issues. In the case of feminist activism, the ideology is promoted and directly shaped when users take advantage of the affordances built into the platform. The users’ behavior with these incidents is seen as an advocate of feminist activism, when they leave their comments below the posts or events online, as well as the retweet and duplicate the hashtags, further triggering the domino effects among the participants online. For the next step, I aim to compare above-mentioned phenomena and explore the role that Twitter plays in the collective formation of feminist politics, by collecting the data from Twitter with the tool DMI-TCAT, and address their expression by analyzing the results.
As stated in the introduction, the way people perceive public event, is changed, and reformed by social media, such as Twitter. Most notably, while people used to receive information and had their opinions shaped by older forms of media that required only passive interaction (e.g., reading newspapers and watching television), social media platforms allow for a mode of democratic engagement that includes interaction and debate with other users on the platform. As social media gets users on boards, the access to participate in social movement increases. In the case of activism via social media, the ideology is promoted and directly shaped when users take advantage of the affordances built into the platform. The users’ behavior is seen as engagements, or even collaboration of the issue, when they leave their comments below the posts or events online, further triggering the domino effects among the participants online, and further into real life, such as political protests or social movements. For the next step, I aim to compare above-mentioned phenomena and explore the role that social media, especially Twitter, plays in the collective formation of hashtags and their politics on social media and their relation with users.
3. Methodology
3.1 Case Study Selection Rationale
Society develops in parallel with its media forms, and vice versa; the process of influence is not linear or unidirectional. For a study of this relationship, Twitter serves as an ideal test case, because it is shown that “Twitter usage is becoming increasingly prominent during events” (Statista 2018). This means that via Twitter, users can have a platform to observe and discuss about current events online. This platform requires the following requirements for researchers; (1) it serves as a mass media phenomenon in itself; and (2) it provides a scope of observation on the patterns of information shared among individuals (Highfield, et.al 316). For instance, the events and demonstrations promulgated on Twitter are able to inspire and motivate millions of people to show up for actual protests, for instance, the Egyptian Revolution. Furthermore, the usage of social media helps in getting global attention, and further becomes a tool for activism. Information released on Twitter is often more instant and spreads much faster than traditional media due to the ubiquity of Internet. As an obvious contemporary example, Donald Trump’s official statements are usually announced on his Twitter account or Facebook Fan page, triggering widespread discussion before news channels even picked them up. As Rogers mentioned in Digital Methods, the social networking sphere is less about informativeness more about socialization. In this way, the interlink on Twitter can be viewed less as a doorway to information than a doorway to social interaction (155).
On the other hand, Twitter offers both qualitative and quantitative data for researchers, as Twitter is a platform where people from all social and educational background can come together to communicate. Data from Twitter has already been widely used because of the vast scope of demographics of users. According to a research, these users include politicians, companies, profit organizations, international non-governmental organizations, celebrities, athletes, journalists, academics, and mainly normal people. Twitter collects information from people with different social and education backgrounds. As for the case studies in this paper, it is indicated that Twitter data has been used for event detection, especially political events. Moreover, while conducting text analysis, it enables users to collect data that can only be understood from the messages themselves. For instance, “accounts that belong to unemployed individuals are more active during the day; and cities with higher levels of unemployment have low communication entropy.” (Llorente et al., 2014) (Steinert-Threlkeld 2018).
These consequences result in my initial research questions: (1) How do users employ hashtags and other affective devices for the purposes of social activism?; (2) How do hashtags like #MeToo and #TimesUp act as persuasive markers for social movements? In order to be able to answer these two questions, I will first collect data from 1,000 posts with the hashtags of either #Metoo and/or #TimesUp on Twitter, that fall within my given timeframe, and perform a content analysis on them. Next, I will categorize the posts into six groups per its topic, including: Resource, Personal Experience, Personal Opinion or Interest, Jokes/ Parody, Marketing, and Unidentified. The rationale of choosing this category distribution is that it represents the way in which content can be distributed form the information in cyberspace, helps examine the phenomena, and further reveal the main purpose why these topics are discussed by people in a higher rate (Chew, Eysenbach 1). Their research module provides a way to measure public approach in prompting events, while it allows researchers to: (1) examine the use of the objects“#Metoo” and “#Timesup” over time; (2) use Twitter as a real-time content, sentiment, and public attention trend-tracking tool, in order to mark the public’s reaction toward the event. Also, it possesses the potential to illustrate the reflection of the public’s attitude via social media, and further provides a scope to look through to public concerns. Here, the domain contents and reactions of the users will be analyzed, including the evaluation of the content, implicit or explicit in the comments of the users, in order to show that Twitter serves in a similar way as persuasive technology does, to further discuss the scope of users’ behavior.
Regarding collecting data for my case study, I set the time frame for datasets of #Metoo and #Timesup from the October 1 2017 to March 2018. October 2017 is around the time when #Metoo started to gain widespread media attention due to Harvey Weinstein’s sexual allegations and Donald Trump’s official election as the President of United State. March 31, 2018 marks the 90th Academy Awards which is another public event that caught global audience’s attention. In this time frame, there are peak times when people paid extra attention to this issue, for example during the Golden Globe Awards on January 7, 2018 at which the hashtag gained actual action. During the Golden Globe Awards ceremony, celebrities wore black to express their support of both the idea of #Metoo and the movement as a whole. In other words, the chosen time frame encompasses both the ‘beginning’ of #Metoo, when the movement was initiated, as well as the moment that users’ online behavior also led to real-life activism, in this case: the ceremony. Secondly, in order to retrieve data within the time frame of specific content, I will use Digital Methods Initiative Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset (DMI-TCAT) as my tool. With DMI-TCAT, it is made possible to collect data from Twitter and capture datasets in different ways. According to the research of Borra and Rieder, it is indicated that the collection from TCAT reveals social phenomena that is software-based (263). Since information from Twitter is tremendously vast and various, this tool serves as a collection machine that is designed to retrieve, enrich, store, and analyze. Meanwhile, Felt states in her research that “TCAT offers abundant metadata and flexibility” (Felt 11). In this module it enables information from the data pool to be parsed separately and represented with resilience. Compared to other Twitter analyzing tools, such as Storify or Netlytic, TCAT provides far more dynamic research options (12-13). Also, the function of DMI-TCAT allows the system to capture data in 35 columns of separate categories (Felt 11) (Borra, Rieder 266). As a result, this tool helps frame data empirically, leaving the "essential" material untouched, while taking versatility in test outline and simple approaches to make subsamples from captured information into consideration, especially when it follows Twitter’s information structures (Borra, Rieder 267).
Thus, I will insert #Metoo and #Timesup on the query bin of the research web page to set up the database, and further process data acquisition. According to the authors, DMI-TCAT will assemble content that includes those keywords and store the information as a group of related tables in the database. Tweets and their metadata, hashtags, URLs, and mentions will be stored in separate tables, which enable users to examine the trend and flow of the content. Afterwards, the data extracted using DMI-TCAT will be exported to Excel, which provides further quantitative analysis. This allows for the visualization of users behavior, such as concluding the users’ purpose of using Twitter and which function is mostly used. Also, I will use statistics to map the pattern created by users’ interactions. Throughout my analysis, #Metoo and #Timesup serve as the symbols of the movement, from the beginning to the peak and to the actual action was noticed by the public. With the connection of these two keywords, I am anticipating a clear view of the appearance of the hashtags in question.
3.2 The Chosen Approach to Data Interpretation
As Felt mentioned in her research article, potential data for analytic is embedded within social media, which allows researchers to understand human interaction. Here, she explained that data provides information to study online behaviors of both individuals and communities as a whole (1). She also illustrates that Twitter serves as a data-assembling platform and shows that the understanding of data supports qualitative analysis, in line with my research method. It is revealed that data investigating is essential in the case, because it provides rich and dynamic information for critical evaluation, such as network analysis, and meta-analysis. Meanwhile, it allows users to have a closer view on when graphic tools such as Excel are used to assist the visualization of the result (14). Whilst the rational of data collection is explained, the quantity of data matters has also proven to matter. DMI-TCAT also offers a function of collecting random Tweets from a set time frame, which is helpful for researchers to collect important data such as, users’ data, posting time, data of followers and the contents of the text. With DMI-TCAT, a random subset of tweets that is a representative sample can be manually classified. This service hence, supports the technique of survey-sampling, which can be helpful when a user is observing great amounts of data, since it describes the process of selecting a sample of elements from a target population to conduct a survey. Although sample survey is not a full-scale investigation, its purpose is to obtain information materials that reflect the overall situation, and therefore, it can also play a role in comprehensive investigation.
There are four main features provided by sample survey: (1) The sample of the survey is selected on the basis of random principles. The chances of being selected for each unit in the population are equal. As a result, a uniform distribution of the units that are drawn in the population can be guaranteed without the occurrence of bias errors. (2) As a "chosen group", all sample units are selected, and the entire "chosen group" is used to represent the general population. Instead of representing the population with randomly selected individual units. (3) The number of selected survey samples is determined by scientific calculation according to the requirements of survey errors, and there is a reliable guarantee for the number of survey samples. And (4) The error of the sample survey can be calculated before the survey based on the sample size of the survey and the degree of difference between the various units in the population which is controlled within the allowable range. The accuracy of the survey results is thus high (http:// www.statsoft.com/Textbook). Hence, I will collect the data and label the contents for further analysis. After
