‘Think global, act local’: How #MeToo hybridized across borders and platforms for contextual relevance

ABSTRACT

Beyond a consciousness-raising hashtag, #MeToo has become a transnational movement, crossing the borders of many societies. However, outsized attention has been paid to the manifestations of #MeToo in the US and on Twitter when the reach of this movement was not restricted to a single country, language, or platform. Drawing from the concept of hybridization, we seek to understand how the uses of #MeToo are contextualized across cultures, languages, and social media platforms. By establishing a macroscopic computational approach, we examine the global diffusion of #MeToo as a hybrid communicative process across different language groups (English, Spanish, and Korean) and social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram). Through time-series analysis and comparative descriptions of language groups and platforms, we demonstrate how discourse flows, language characteristics, and actors differ across cultural and platform contexts and how public discourse of #MeToo was reappropriated and re-signified in different parts of the world to localize connective action.

KEYWORDS:

• #MeToo
• global digital feminism
• hybridization
• connective action
• social media
• computational comparative analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We used the sum of retweets, replies, and favorites for Twitter; for Facebook, likes, shares, and reactions; for Instagram, likes and replies.

2 In April 2018, five men were accused of raping a woman at the Saint Fermín festival in 2016 but were convicted for sexual abuse, not rape (‘La Manada’). This led to the creation of #Cuéntalo (#Tellit), #noesno (#nomeansno), and #yositecreo (#ibelieveyou). In Chile, more than 40 college student groups organized ‘Mayo Feminista,’ consecutive strikes to demand protocols against sexual harassment and to combat sexist educational practices.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and National Research Foundation of Korea. Also, Teresa Correa received funding from the National Agency of Research and Development [ANID] in Chile through Milennium Nucleus on Digital Inqualities and Opportunities NUDOS [grant NCS2022_046], Futures of Artificial Intelligence Research FAIR [NCS 2022_065] and Fondecyt 1210740. Catalina Faías was supported by NUDOS [grant NCS2022_046].

Notes on contributors

Jiyoun Suk

Jiyoun Suk is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Connecticut.

Yibing Sun

Yibing Sun is a Ph.D. student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Luhang Sun

Luhang Sun is a Ph.D. student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Mengyu Li

Mengyu Li is a Ph.D. student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Catalina Farías

Catalina Farías is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University.

Hyerin Kwon

Hyerin Kwon is a Ph.D. student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Shreenita Ghosh

Shreenita Ghosh is a Mass Communication Research Center Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Porismita Borah

Porismita Borah is Professor at the Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University.

Darshana Sreedhar Mini

Darshana Sreedhar Mini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Teresa Correa

Teresa Correa is Professor in the School of Communication at Diego Portales University.

Christine Garlough

Christine Garlough is Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Director of the Center for Research on Gender and Women.

Dhavan V. Shah

Dhavan V. Shah is the Louis A. & Mary E. Maier-Bascom Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.