# Contextual Affective Analysis: A Case Study of People Portrayals in Online #MeToo Stories

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.04164 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04164/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [A Survey on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14168/) (2021)
- [Are Large Language Models Capable of Generating Human-Level Narratives?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13248/) (2024)
- [To Protect and To Serve? Analyzing Entity-Centric Framing of Police Violence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05325/) (2021)
- ["Don't quote me on that": Finding Mixtures of Sources in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09656/) (2021)
- [Riveter: Measuring Power and Social Dynamics Between Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09536/) (2023)
- [Measuring Dimensions of Self-Presentation in Twitter Bios and their Links to Misinformation Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09548/) (2023)
- [Extracting Incidents, Effects, and Requested Advice from MeToo Posts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10573/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In October 2017, numerous women accused producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment. Their stories encouraged other women to voice allegations of sexual harassment against many high profile men, including politicians, actors, and producers. These events are broadly referred to as the #MeToo movement, named for the use of the hashtag "#metoo" on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. The movement has widely been referred to as "empowering" because it has amplified the voices of previously unheard women over those of traditionally powerful men. In this work, we investigate dynamics of sentiment, power and agency in online media coverage of these events. Using a corpus of online media articles about the #MeToo movement, we present a contextual affective analysis---an entity-centric approach that uses contextualized lexicons to examine how people are portrayed in media articles. We show that while these articles are sympathetic towards women who have experienced sexual harassment, they consistently present men as most powerful, even after sexual assault allegations. While we focus on media coverage of the #MeToo movement, our method for contextual affective analysis readily generalizes to other domains.