Twitter And Feminism, Or: This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

How Twitter views modern feminism and how it's largely a bummer. I'm a Data Science student and these are my findings on how Twitter views Feminism. Enjoy!

What Even Is Feminism?

Lots of people don't seem to know the definition so, that seems like a good place to start.

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fem·i·nism

ˈfeməˌnizəm'

noun

the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men.

This is why we need a definition brush up.

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"RT @TheBlackVoice: It's amazing how threatened men are by the term feminist while not even being able to provide a working definition of it."

"Vicsor Jensen ‏@Sarochi1 Jul 21

I think the point of #WomenAgainstFeminism is the radical notion that equality & decency is more important than the label it operates under."

'RT @k_mcq: Be a lady, never a feminist.'

"RT @awmarissa: Girls who shit on feminism need a reality check you're literally pushing things back. How can you be against equal rights?"

'RT @snoozyloser: if ur a girl that is against feminism why r u voting. why r u wearing pants. how can u read',

'RT @OGTREEZ: Everytime you say feminist you gotta say men too.'

Hypothesis

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Like how the argument that using "gay" as a pejorative wasn't inherently homophobic stopped being acceptable, I think the argument over the usage of vocabulary ("the ideas are more important than the labels #thelabels") indicates a larger bias than those people would like to admit.

Regardless of the distraction debate over linguistics, my theory is that Twitter doesn't like feminism.

Why Twitter?

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People say things on the internet they wouldn't say to anyone's face. Twitter, especially, allows people to say things without inhibition (or, perhaps, thought) and so makes for a great measure of attitudes people would never admit to someone in a white coat.

For more on how Twitter is being used in social research, click here

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2014 was an great year for feminism. Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Hunger Games, Frozen, legalized abortion, oh my!

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2015 has been having some backlash issues against feminism. Like this, posted by the "Independent Women's Forum"

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Straw Feminists Everywhere!

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Someone on Reddit posted this famous Hark A Vagrant comic on the fallacy of "straw feminists" to a real MRA conversation, having entirely missed the humor.

So What Does Twitter Think of Feminism?

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Mostly, it's bad.

According to my model, where I trained it on tweets I coded as positive and negative and then had it extrapolate to my 30k tweet corpus taken from the Twitter API via Tweepy:

Twitter is 54% negative on feminism

Word Cloud Of All The 30k Tweets Collected

Word Cloud of Positive Tweets

Word Cloud of Negative Tweets

Most ReTweeted Tweets on Feminism

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RT @vanbadham: Why feminism? Because you can sell 30 MILLION copies of a single book and when you die, The Australian prints this: ->

RT @vanbadham: Why feminism? Because she was ALSO a FREAKIN' NEUROPHYSICIST at YALE & this is how The Australian begins her obituary

Anything Vulva-shaped for a laugh

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"RT @JessicaKRoy: finally a feminist snowstorm"

For those that require more context: "We've seen plenty of storms shaped like penises, but this is the first one I've seen shaped like a vulva. Today, like August 18, 1920, will go down in history as a major milestone in women's rights."

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RT @MeninistTweet: Today, a feminist asked me how I view lesbian relationships... Apparently "in HD" was not the right answer

And some small bastions of hope

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RT @hayleyestxlle: Feminism has never made me hate men but men's reaction to feminism definitely has.

RT @TheBlackVoice: It's amazing how threatened men are by the term feminist while not even being able to provide a working definition

RT @clementine_ford: I keep hearing that feminism is bad for women, and I think what that's supposed mean is that feminism is bad for men

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Intersectionality

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A tweet with the text "white feminism" was retweeted with this remarkably demonstrative view of the 3rd wave issue of intersectionality. #solidarityisforwhitewomen

"RT @TheBlackVoice: Feminism isn't a threat to the Black community, but sexism is."

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Other Clusters of Thought About Feminism

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'do not rape a feminist it would fulfill her hot rape fantasies and let us be honest what kind of animal would want to make a feminist happy’

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'people who say we dont need feminism and everyone is already equal clearly arent aware of whats going on around the world’

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“ellekersten because theres a difference between a women who is a feminist and a women who wants equal rights feminist are crazy”

Context is hard.

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Comedian Josh Knight ‏@JoshKnightComic Feb 13

@TheMeninism Your Move, Feminists. #meninist #MeninistTwitter #meninism

^ That tweet is serious.

This tweet is sarcasm/irony:

ManForMeninism @YesMeninism

I need meninism because it's so much easier to pretend women cause all my problems than to admit what I actually need is feminism.

While my model does account for some human nuances, because I trained the model on tweets I coded by hand, sometimes 144 characters is not enough to really get context. Because, let's be honest, if someone who I knew shared my politics told me that, "in HD" joke at a party, I'd laugh because context is this big important and meaningful thing.

Without a much larger sample size coded by as many people as possible, to allow for personal bias, or using a person's whole twitter profile to create a likelihood model of their irony to genuine hatred ratio, my model has to go mostly by what the words are in each lone text.

For more on false positives and how twitter context is hard, check out Patton Oswalt trolling the internet.

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For more on this project, check out my github: https://github.com/heatherjcohen/DSProject