#WomenBoycottTwitter movement still garners 170,000+ mentions during the day
Talk around the one day #WomenBoycottTwitter movement saw it mentioned nearly 1750,000 times during the Friday the action took place. The hashtag was created to encourage users to silence themselves in support of prominent and temporarily banned actress and activist, Rose McGowan in order to demonstrate that the platform had issues it could no longer ignore.
#WomenBoycottTwitter movement
According to exclusive data provided by Meltwater to The Drum, the hashtag for the movement was mentioned 172,667 during research that took place on Friday 13 October from 9.30am (GMT), while McGowan received 59,412 mentions during the same timeframe.
McGowan is one of the many accusers of movie mogul Harvey Wienstein, and has used Twitter as a way of voicing issues with the movie industry, especially around sexual harassment. Her account was closed for 12 hours earlier in the week, which was seen a censorship being carried out by Twitter which later claimed to have done so due to her distributing a telephone number on the platform.
Themes that tended during the day that were connected to the hashtag included ‘support’, ‘conflict’, ‘Ladies’, ‘Censorship’ and ‘White House’ with ‘Rose’ found to be mentioned in 5% of related conversations.
The geographical spread of the hastash on Twitter included 36% in the US, 4% in both UK and India and 3% in Canada, although almost half of the sentiment (42%) was found to be negative, with just over half (28%) positive and (30%) was neutral as a result of people disagreeing with the action, making fun of it simply due to the nature of the topic.
Following the day of silence, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey promised new measures to protect users from violent and sexual messages will be introduced in the coming weeks.