Carol Liebler, professor of communications, co-authored the paper “#MeToo on Twitter: The migration of celebrity capital and social capital in online celebrity advocacy” with Li Chen of Weber State University. The paper was published in New Media & Society.
Utilizing the #MeToo movement as its case, this article examines celebrities’ symbolic power using social media’s connectivity to enlarge the impact of social causes. This article adopts social network analysis as the primary method to explore the relationship between two #MeToo networks and media coverage regarding celebrities’ roles. Based on theories of social capital and celebrity capital, the results of this article find that famous people’s symbolic power in one social field can transfer into the social activism field through investment in their celebrity capital and social capital.