In their new article, “‘Think Global, Act Local’: How #MeToo Hybridized Across Borders and Platforms for Contextual Relevance,” in Information, Communication & Society, the Social Media and Democracy group examine the #MeToo movement through the global lens and demonstrate how the movement contextually differs across various language groups and social media platforms.
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.
Full citation: Jiyoun Suk, Yibing Sun, Luhang Sun, Mengyu Li, Catalina Farías, Hyerin Kwon, Shreenita Ghosh, Porismita Borah, Darshana Sreedhar Mini, Teresa Correa, Christine Garlough & Dhavan V. Shah (2023): ‘Think global, act local’: How #MeToo hybridized across borders and platforms for contextual relevance, Information, Communication & Society, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2023.2219716
Access to the full article is available through Routledge.