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

Jiyoun Suk, Yibing Sun, Luhang Sun, Mengyu Li, Catalina Farías, Hyerin Kwon, Shreenita Ghosh, Porismita Borah, Darshana Sreedhar Mini, Teresa Correa, Christine Garlough, Dhavan Shah

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.