Can Women Break the Glass Ceiling?: An Analysis of #MeToo Hashtagged Posts on Twitter

In October 2017, there happened the uprising of an unprecedented online movement on social media by women across the world who started publicly sharing their untold stories of being sexually harassed along with the hashtag #MeToo (or some variants of it). Those stories did not only strike the silence that had long hid the perpetrators, but also allowed women to discharge some of their bottled-up grievances, and revealed many important information surrounding sexual harassment. In this paper, we present our analysis of about one million such tweets collected between October 15 and October 31, 2017 that reveals some interesting patterns and attributes of the people, place, emotions, actions, and reactions related to the tweeted stories. Based on our analysis, we also advance the discussion on the potential role of online social media in breaking the silence of women by factoring in the strengths and limitations of these platforms.