Giving Compass' Take:

· Writing for Futurity, Virginia Alvino Young examines bias in media coverage of the #MeToo movement. 

· How can the media remove bias from these stories? How can philanthropists help with these efforts? 

· Here's how to support journalists responses to #MeToo.

The #MeToo movement has encouraged women to share their personal stories of sexual harassment. “The goal of the movement is to empower women, but according to our computational analysis that’s not what’s happening in news stories,” says coauthor Yulia Tsvetkov, assistant professor in the School of Computer Science’s Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

Tsvetkov’s research team used natural language processing (NLP) techniques to analyze online media coverage of #MeToo narratives that included 27,602 articles in 1,576 outlets. In their study, they also looked at how different media outlets portrayed perpetrators, and considered the role of third-party actors in news stories.

“Bias can be unconscious, veiled, and hidden in a seemingly positive narrative,” Tsvetkov says. “Such subtle forms of biased language can be much harder to detect and to date we have no systematic way of identifying them automatically. The goal of our research was to provide tools to analyze such biased framing.”

Read the full article about media coverage of the #MeToo movement by Virginia Alvino Young at Futurity.