From Hashtag Activism to Digital Archiving:
Preserving the MeToo Cultural Heritage
by
Christina Maraboutaki
Not so long ago, so-called ego-documents, forms of personal writing that reveal something of the author’s self, were regarded with suspicion in the fields of political, diplomatic, and military history (Mortimer 2002, 189). Diaries, memoirs, and autobiographies created an uneasiness among historians for various reasons: their ambiguous position between “reality” and imagination, the allegedly unstable nature of memory, or the unclear motives of the author. Women’s history, gender theory, and gender history have shifted the gaze of historians away from traditional historical sources towards these types of ego-documents (Von Greyerz 2010, 275).
Over the past few decades, a new area of study has emerged as individuals willingly and extensively disclose aspects of their lives online. Instagram stories, Facebook posts, and TikTok videos could be seen as significant resources for research. On social media platforms, users often document day-to-day activities, life events, and related emotions in chronological order, as in a diary or a travel journal, creating another kind of ego-document. I do not intend to use the concept of the ego-document as a catch-all category, but it is my intention to examine the methodological challenges that social media material poses to historians, archivists, and activists. To approach these sources of personal and collective testimony as documents that need to be gathered and maintained, I investigate the initiative of the Schlesinger Library at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute to create a digital archive of the MeToo phenomenon in the United States. The Schlesinger Library’s project offers precious insights into the technical and ethical difficulties often created by the digital realm. In addition, choosing a case study that aims to record the MeToo event provides a valuable opportunity to delve into the multifaceted aspects of social change, activist and archivist practices as well as (social) media power. In the following sections, I will briefly refer to hashtag activism using the #MeToo case and then concentrate on the Schlesinger Library’s archival project highlighting some concerns, reflections, and ideas for further research.
Hashtag Activism: The #MeToo Case
On October 5, 2017, the New York Times published a story reporting a series of sexual harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein, at the time a prominent film producer (Kantor and Twohey 2017). Reports from dozens of other women were published in the following days, including three allegations of rape. On October 15, 2017, the celebrated actress and activist Alyssa Milano tweeted a note that read: “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet - Suggested by a friend: If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” The next morning, she found 3,000 replies to her post. In the following few days, over 1.7 million tweets included the hashtag #MeToo, with 85 countries having at least 1,000 #MeToo tweets and more than 4.7 million Facebook users making 12 million posts, comments, and reactions (Park 2017). Milano’s initial purpose was to raise awareness about the extent of sexual violence. As people shared their personal experiences and expressed support for survivors and victims, however, the MeToo agenda broadened: participants called for accountability, new legislation, HR policies and changes in the workplace.
Despite the publicity this moment has received, it was not the movement’s inaugural moment nor was Milano the first to use the “me too” slogan. Eleven years earlier, in 2006, through a Myspace post, feminist activist Tarana Burke set in motion a grassroots movement intending to support survivors of sexual violence—particularly black women and girls—through community-based activism. Envisioning empowering women through empathy, Burke’s aim was to create a platform and safe space for girls to share experiences of sexual violence (Popova 2019, 153). “I was just made aware of an earlier #MeToo movement, and the origin story is equal parts heartbreaking and inspiring”, Milano tweeted two days after her initial post, acknowledging Burke as the founder of the movement. Within the mainstream coverage of the MeToo phenomenon, however, the impression that white female celebrities are the protagonists of the MeToo movement still exists at large.
Hollywood workers did of course facilitate the visibility of the campaign, but it hadn’t always been like this: the same mass media that enthusiastically hosted them in 2017 and were shocked by their stories, had turned their backs on them until very recently. For Black women, however, the complexities of their lives are still missing from the mainstream media. In addition, it is not just the media that view white women’s experiences of inequality and conceptions of gender equity as neutral and normative: as Sandy Grande (2004) argues, mainstream feminism continues to overlook the correlation between white supremacy and misogyny. The 2017 #MeToo campaign managed to spread widely because it did not rest solely on mainstream media coverage, nor was it just white female celebrities advocating for justice.
In fact, the use of the #MeToo hashtag provided “common people” with the opportunity to share information and opinions, to interact and engage in a larger conversation with the potential to create change. Through hashtag activism, marginalized or vulnerable groups have been able to communicate, mobilize, and advocate for issues less visible to the mainstream. This was Burke’s approach as well, but Myspace in 2006 cannot conceivably be compared to the power Twitter (now X) had in 2017. Over the fifteen years leading up to 2017, the whole social media dynamic had changed. Even within the Twitter universe, however, and in more recent instances, there have been plenty of trending feminist hashtags with similar interests in mind, such as the #WhyIStayed hashtag in 2014, which was raising awareness about abusive relationships (Clark 2016).
Nevertheless, it must be mentioned that the conceptualization of the digital sphere as an all-inclusive, democratic, and secure space is, if not naïve, certainly idealistic: common experience and studies (Banet-Weiser 2018) have shown that on social media platforms—owned by big tech companies—popular feminism coexists with popular misogyny. In this context, what prevails is the problematic representation of a polarized debate that places the battle against sexual violence at one end of the conversation as if it were an extreme position to take. At the other end, users deny the magnitude of the problem or attribute it to individual cases (“not all men”), failing to acknowledge the systemic nature of sexual violence. This perspective, which is the only one representing an extreme position on the topic, is part of a broader backlash. This backlash includes efforts to discredit or undermine the movement’s goals, dismiss the experiences of survivors, or defend the status quo. At its core, the debate is about fundamental human rights and dignity. The polarization of the discussion is then followed by how fast virality comes and goes; the next viral hashtag trend substitutes for the previous one.
Despite these challenges, in 2017 the simultaneous uncovering of numerous stories of sexual and gender-based violence inspired political mobilization on a larger scale, transforming the #MeToo slogan into an iconic image with empowering connotations. In a short time, the #MeToo campaign managed to become a local and global event, changing the way sexual violence is understood and discussed. It resulted in widespread workplace dismissals, resignations, and criminal charges for perpetrators. In some cases, it led to institutional changes in sexual harassment policies across many industries (Corbett 2023). As an important social and cultural event (which primarily or at least initially emerged online) the #MeToo case has left behind a massive digital footprint. This chaotic, ever-expanding, and fragile material needs to be collected.
Digital Archiving: The Schlesinger Library’s Initiative
When social events reach digital spaces or when these events emerge on social media platforms, as in the case of the #MeToo campaign, the volume of generated information becomes both unimaginable and unmanageable. A high level of readiness is required for museums and archives to be able to gather material circulating in digital spaces. The Schlesinger Library’s initiative aligns with this vision, dedicating time, resources, and expertise to create a digital collection of the MeToo phenomenon.
Specifically, the Schlesinger Library is a research library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, which serves as a leading repository for a range of primary-source materials documenting the lives and legacies of women in America. The library traces its beginnings back to August 26, 1943, when Radcliffe College received a significant contribution of books, papers, and memorabilia from alumna Maud Wood Park, a prominent figure in the women’s suffrage movement. This collection, known as the “Woman’s Rights Collection,” formed the foundation of a research library initially called the “Women’s Archives.” Over the 1940s and 1950s, Radcliffe College gradually expanded this library which was renamed in 1965 in honour of Harvard University historian Arthur M. Schlesinger and suffragist and pioneer in the field of women’s history Elizabeth Bancroft Schlesinger. During the 1960s and 1970s, a new wave of the women’s movement emerged, leading to a significant expansion of the collections. Feminist activists produced their own documents and publications, further enriching the library’s holdings.
Thanks to the library’s long experience in collecting materials related to the history of feminism and women’s activism, the library promptly recognized the importance of #MeToo and already in June 2018 announced its intention to gather its digital footprint. In a few words, the project focuses on collecting media with the hashtag #MeToo and a long list of related hashtags, websites, online articles, and other electronic material relevant to the MeToo agenda. This translates into millions of tweets and hundreds of thousands of web pages. The material is primarily in English but can also be in other languages, provided that the point of publication is the United States. The collection dates from 2017 with the popularization of the #MeToo hashtag and is said to end when activity subsides, with the last entry recorded on March 29, 2023.
A steering committee of historians, lawyers, and data experts from across Harvard collaborated to figure out how to gather the electronic material related to the MeToo movement and its accompanying political, legal, and social debates in a publicly accessible digital archive. The collection was finally made available to the public on July 1, 2020, containing more than 32 million tweets, 1,100 web pages, and thousands of articles reflecting a range of perspectives, capturing both the support for and opposition to the movement. As is evident, the project is very ambitious in scale, collecting material across numerous industries from every region in the US and is freely accessible online for interdisciplinary research. Jane Kamensky, the Schlesinger director and Professor of History at Harvard, underlines the importance of the project: “People are going to ask questions of it and produce answers from it that will be far-reaching in scope and scale. A sophisticated analyst of big data will be able to see the movement through this corpus in ways that I can’t even fathom” (Parsons 2020).
For a non-sophisticated analyst, however, navigating the library’s datasets can be confusing. X’s terms of service, for example, dictate that the library provides users with only tweet IDs, numeric codes that identify each unique tweet. Researchers must take an extra step to restore the original content, either manually via X (and we are talking about tens of millions of tweets) or by uploading the codes to a web application. It also needs to be said that, as Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein have shown (2020), social media data are not neutral or objective, but the products of an unequal ecosystem which influences the conduct of an ethical analysis and often restricts its political impact. To address at least the practical issues of accessing the datasets, the Schlesinger Library suggests using the DocNow Hydrator tool, a free, open-source piece of software.
Accessing the datasets is a complicated task, not only because the rules of the social media platforms change, but also because the material itself keeps shrinking. Even if an item, such as a tweet, has already been included in the catalogue, this does not mean it survives into the present. Many tweets whose content I tried to retrieve had been deleted or their owners’ accounts had been deactivated. The collection appears more like a living organism, constantly changing shape and size. In a way, it seems that the digital archive can destabilize the hegemonic permanence of a traditional archive, which is largely seen as fixed.
This digital archive, always in the making, is as chaotic as it is ephemeral. Maintaining it raises ethical questions as well, particularly concerning privacy and the right to access information posted online. The Schlesinger Library produced an ethics statement with the acknowledgement that the project abides by social media providers’ terms of service in the distribution of any data that is collected, but ethical concerns remain. Many social media users, for instance, believe they own their publications and that no other party can use this (sometimes very sensitive) information. They might see the generation of original content as a fleeting practice, one that typically does not become a part of an institution’s collection, except perhaps within the realms of the social media platform’s database. Do museums and institutions have the right to gather, document, and display this material for research purposes? Ego-documents, in general, pose similar questions. Once a diary is in a museum or collection, usually through donation, purchase, or bequest, it is typically catalogued, preserved, and made available to researchers and the public for study, even if its author never considered this possibility. In the digital realm, however, the rapid dissemination of information, the widespread access to this information, and the sensitive nature of the content transform these questions into pressing ethical issues. In the case of the Schlesinger Library, the project’s fundamental idea is that the MeToo material needs, before anything else, to be collected and protected. As Kamensky puts it, “The argument is always in favor of preservation and against loss. As a historian, I believe we only understand things through primary evidence. Anything that stays dark is not going to be understood” (Caplan-Bricker 2019).
It is true that MeToo’s evidence needs to be preserved not only because of the significant social and cultural impact the movement has had, but also because this very evidence could disappear. Internet content is much more ephemeral than it often seems, and a piece of paper could easily outlast a webpage. If archivists and activists are not the ones to collect these digital (ego-)documents, then who will?
References
Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2018. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Caplan-Bricker, Nora. 2019. “The Challenge of Preserving the Historical Record of #MeToo.” The New Yorker, March 11, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-challenge-of-preserving-the-historical-record-of-metoo.
Clark, Rosemary. 2016. “‘Hope in a Hashtag’: The Discursive Activism of #WhyIStayed.” Feminist Media Studies 16 (5): 788–804. doi:10.1080/14680777.2016.1138235.
Corbett, Holly. 2023. “The #MeToo Movement Six Years Later: What’s Changed and What’s Next.” Forbes, November 16, 2023. https://www.forbes.com/sites/hollycorbett/2023/11/16/the-metoo-movement-six-years-later-whats-changed-and-whats-next/.
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Parsons, Lian. 2020. “Challenge of Archiving the #MeToo Movement.” Harvard Gazette, August 11, 2020. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/08/challenge-of-archiving-the-metoo-movement/.
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