Political Polarisation on Gender Equality: The Case of the Swiss Women's Strike on Twitter

Abstract

Social media platforms constitute an indispensable tool for social movements to mobilise public opinion to promote social change. To date, however, little is known about the extent to which activist and political claims formulated on social media echo what the general public thinks about gender equality. This is especially important given that social movements often use social media to develop their actions and to build long-standing support around particular claims. Our data collection is based on relevant actor groups and keywords surrounding the women's strike that took place in Switzerland in June 2019. We investigate which actor groups were involved in gender equality discussions online, what were the prominent and polarising ideologies, and what were the main framings of the debate. Findings indicate that organizational committees and their followers were the most active, followed by political actors. We also observed a polarisation effect on social media between left and right-wing oriented actors, which is more pronounced than trends drawn from opinion surveys. We further find that social media discussions were organised along a continuum, which ranges between calling for attention and discussing concrete policy measures.