It’s been a tumultuous start to 2021 especially for Australia’s parliament. Allegations of rape, sexual assult and violence against women have plagued the headlines. Christian Porter fumbled for words in his press conference defending himself against historical rape allegations and the Prime Minister coined the unfortunate phrase “womens issue’s” and trilled that protesters in this country are lucky they aren’t met with bullets.

Across the globe, the disappearance of Sarah Everard sparked an urgency to address the disparity in gender violence, namely towards women. A chorus of voices began in Australia as Brittany Higgins blew the whistle on the canberra bubble and the march for Justice #march4justice rallied thousands of women (and men) to stand publicly against violence and harassment. The internet exploded around the culture of toxic masculinity and gender inequality, opening up the floor to overdue conversations and a plea for acknowledgement on the topic. In the usual trend of the internet, not all conversations are progressive.

Social media platforms mediate a battleground these days between politicians, media publications, prominent and regular folk all of whom are armed with hashtags to hurl at each other. Hashtags being the glue of the conversation with their ability to relate tweets, topics or themes together. They give rise to online movements, connecting people together that ordinarily wouldn’t, fuelling the fire in a positive or negative trajectory. This March saw the reemergence of #NotAllMen trending on twitter in response to men being asked to examine their behaviour, culture and ingrained masculinity.

This is not a new hashtag having appeared periodically in the last decade and appears to act as a deflection shield when conversations get uncomfortable. A seemingly lazy rebuttal, it is often a composite ‘tag to #whitelivesmatter and in opposition of the #MeToo movement. The tweet cloud below denotes the current hashtags associated with #NotAllMen and gives a very basic idea of the conversations permeating this topic.

This hashtag centralizes around the theme that the larger issue is getting lost or diminished in an emotional response which is in tone with the sentiment around tags such as #AlllivesMatter. As a response to the hashtag, articles circulated to decrypt the idea that all men were being viewed in a defamatory manner and circulated a back and forth between #NotAllMen and #EnougisEnough as garnered by the charts below which is data from the last two months, until April 10th. This tag spiked heavily around the March for justice rallies as depicted below and the sentiment chart denotes negative engagement which is surpassed by a positive engagement during this time. This information drawn from hashtagify.me also denotes heavy engagement throughout its existence.

Through analysis of Twitter, it could be deduced that this somewhat politically charged hashtag was generally avoided by prominent figures and verified accounts, its origin story enshrined in misogyny and meninism, with groups such as The Red Pill, making it unsavoury to align with. Usage of this tag is more noted with microbloggers, many with large followings, who utilize it as a championing tool to pave a better way forward for discussion and expression. Everyday activists on twitter seeking to educate rather than alienate, despite the tone of this tag remaining grim as the tweetdeck below illustrates.

Hashtags on a whole can be misleading due to their subjectivity. In dealing with a human slash political issue , there is only so much emotion that technology can quantify. In conclusion #NotallMen in terms of sentiment analysis has been a gateway hashtag that in a reverse psychology paradigm, surfaced to facilitate many important conversations. It naturally sparked debate along the way and has seemingly promoted traction for understanding of gender inequality but the implosion of this tag is likely only at its half life. It’s hard to separate mansplaining from the chatter around #NotallMen, but the following is mansplaining for men, brilliant.

The Apple Juice analogy from a guy who gets it. https://t.co/H8lqo4QNjN pic.twitter.com/kE9zjEQ4K6

— 🍿🍿🍿🍿 Popcultured4 💚💚💚💚 (@PopCultured4) April 6, 2021

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