ABSTRACT
Empowered by social media, public discourse about social activism and social issues has become one of the most impactful public communication phenomena in the digital space. Given the challenging crises such social media activism would bring to the organization, social media activism gains the attention of public relations scholars and practitioners on understanding what and how lay users (i.e., daily and unofficial social media users) engage on social media via commenting to and sharing activism related information. Since narrative was recognized as a strong persuasive tool to drive information virality, motivate public engagement, and shape public understanding, this study, grounded in the perspective of public-centric crisis communication and narrative, conducted a computer-assisted content analysis, using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), to identify what and how different crisis narratives about the #MeToo social movement made Twitter users spread the #MeToo campaign message quickly and widely. The results showed as follows: First, celebrities made the issue of the #MeToo social movement become salient and evoked Twitter users to share and comment on celebrities’ posts. However, tweets with celebrity stories did not trigger Twitter users to create their own #MeToo stories to mutually share stories among each other. Second, when different crisis narratives are examined, blame-based narrative tweets motivated higher sharing while renewal-based narratives tweets led to both higher sharing and commenting. Third, gender stereotype was detected in tweets about the #MeToo social movement. Our findings suggest that, for social movement driven public communications aimed to increase public discourse and foster dialogues on Twitter, renewal and blame narratives, with celebrity figures highlighted, seem to be most effective in enhancing social issue engagement among users. Practically, this study provided guidance for organizations to engage in social media activism, telling compelling narratives and reaching a mutual beneficiary relationship between organizations and the public.
