“WEINSTEINGATE”: COMMENT AS A MEANS OF PUBLIC OPINION REPRESENTATION

Abstract

The research is focused on the contents of the texts of the comments published in the English-language social network “Facebook” on the topic of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment. The work considers social media comments as a representation of society, which reflects the opinion of users communicating within electronic resources and platforms. The task of the study is to identify the characteristics of value judgments of the English-speaking Internet community, verbalizing the public’s attitude to the acute social topic of sexual harassment. To achieve the goal of the research, the authors applied the methods of semantic, context and quantitative analyses. Context analysis of the comments allowed revealing a negative attitude of English-speaking users towards the topic of sexual harassment. The authors of analyzed comments often associate the topic of harassment with political events within the United States as well as the problems of gender differentiation in society.