Reclaiming publicness in the face of sexual assault: Social media, disclosure, and visibility

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2019In recent years, social media have supported a host of viral campaigns aiming to increase awareness of, accountability for, and social justice around sexual assault (e.g., Maas, McCauley, Bonomi, & Leija, 2018; Provenzano, 2017). These campaigns are frequently Twitter-centered (e.g., #MeToo, #NotOkay) and often rely on survivors’ stories to destigmatize sexual assault and increase compassion for the survivors of sexual assault. Organized calls for disclosure, such as #MeToo, have received criticism, however, for needlessly increasing the vulnerability of and risk of harm to sexual assault survivors who participate (White, 2017). Apart from these campaigns, however, sexual assault survivors disclose personal stories of sexual assault victimization on social media using descriptive and identifying hashtags, such as #SexualAssault and #SexualAssaultSurvivor. The present study focuses on the motivations and communicative practices of this population of sexual assault survivors visible on social media. Disclosure, the revelation of personal information (Omarzu, 2000), is typically considered a strategic and goal-oriented behavior. Understood through a Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theoretical lens, decision-making processes surrounding disclosure are informed by dialectical tensions such as conceal-reveal and risk-reward (Petronio, 2002). There are myriad motivations for disclosure that sexual assault survivors and research reports suggest are benefits of disclosure, including seeking social support or other aid (Ullman, 1999), processing experiences (Ahrens et al., 2007), seeking to educate others or raise awareness (Ahrens et al,. 2007), supporting similar others (Bogen, Millman, Huntington, & Orchowski, 2018), and seeking justice (Powell, 2015). The risks to survivors who choose to disclose a sexual assault include negative reactions such as judgment, stigma, and blame (Ahrens, 2006; Ullman, 1999). Research additionally indicates that social media contexts can be leveraged in abusive tactics (e.g., monitoring, harassment) exerted through sexual assault and relationship abuse (Freed et al., 2018), suggesting additional risks associated with social media as disclosure sites. A social media landscape that is frequently and demonstrably toxic toward women and other vulnerable populations further informs this tension (Dhrodia, 2018; Vera-Gray, 2017). Additionally, social media as a disclosure context differs significantly from face-to-face contexts due to characteristics of the platform, including its potential for “masspersonal” communication (O’Sullivan & Carr, 2018) and abilities afforded by features and policies. Visibility, the degree to which content is “seeable” to others (Thompson, 2005), that is afforded by social media both supports survivors’ motivations and increases survivors’ vulnerability (Fritz & Gonzales, 2018; Petronio, 2002). This project centers on the experiences of sexual assault survivors who engage in highly visible disclosure, such as public, hashtagged disclosure on social media, to show the range of motivations, reactions, and social media structures that inform disclosure. Findings from qualitative interviews and social network analyses of Twitter hashtag networks suggest that survivors report engaging in deliberate practices regarding disclosure motivation, assessing social media platforms’ suitability for disclosure, considering and targeting audience(s) to disclosure as well as likely reactions from these audiences to disclosure, and strategically leverage social media affordances, including visibility, to manage risks, target and constrain audiences, and otherwise pursue motivations. This analysis thus contributes to literature on strategic visibility management of sexual assault disclosure in a social media context as well as to scholarship on social media users’ perceptions of platform utilities and affordances for disclosure. The mixed-methods approach, informed by network ethnography methods (Howard, 2002), lends nuance to work on online disclosure networks in suggesting that sexual assault survivors leverage multiple communicative channels (public posts and private messages) with varying levels of visibility to engage in reciprocal disclosure and resource exchange. In light of this, the high percentage of isolate (i.e., self-loop) tweets containing disclosure, again in combination with participant insights, suggests that survivors perceive hashtags as affording searchability and visibility more so than connecting topically similar content. These insights would not be discernable from either research method alone. This approach is also novel in its application to online disclosure networks and builds on literature using similar methods to address offline networks and sexual assault disclosure (Dworkin, Pittenger, & Allen, 2016). The findings here suggest that support providers, such as anti-violence practitioners, could better use social media to challenge stigma, validate survivors’ experiences, and promote and provide support and resources to survivors