The Evolution of #MeToo: A Comparative Analysis of Vernacular Practices Over Time and Across Languages

Abstract

Drawing from a thematic analysis of 960 tweets for English, 960 tweets for German, and 753 tweets for Mandarin, this article explores how the #MeToo movement was taken up and used in different ways in the first 12 months. The article achieves this by drawing on the concept of platform vernacular, identifying three new, at times overlapping, vernacular practices: spotlighting, interconnectivity, and meta conversations. We argue that these vernacular practices function more than simply as the dominant “grammars of communication” in #MeToo but connect individual experiences of sexual violence to broader political structures such as patriarchy, homophobia, xenophobia, and racism. Yet, as our analysis uncovered, while the vernacular practices enabled #MeToo to be politicized, these systems of oppression were not always challenged, but at times, reinforced. As such, while previous research has shown how (affective) vernacular practices shape what we know and feel about sexual violence, this article highlights how vernacular practices fundamentally shape how the public contextualizes and (mis)understands sexual violence as a political issue. Overall, the article contributes to scholarship in the field of new media, feminism, and communication by showing how hashtags are taken up by the public in different ways and how shared vernacular practices emerge across languages, even when the content, focus, or rhetoric may diverge.

Introduction

The phrase “me too” was coined by African American activist Tarana Burke in 2006 to help women of color who experienced sexual violence. It gained popularity in 2017 after American Actress Alissa Milano posted a tweet calling for people to share their experiences of sexual harassment using the phrase “Me too.” Soon after, the #MeToo hashtag went global and was picked up by 1.7 million Twitter users across 85 countries (Park, 2017).

As it spread across national boundaries, #MeToo was fueled by various forms of participation (Nau et al., 2022), but also triggered unexpected engagement orientations such as “hijacking” the hashtag to promote far-right agendas and expressions that willfully misunderstood the movement (Boyle & Rathnayake, 2020; de Maricourt & Burrell, 2022), as well as broad anti-feminism backlash (Kay, 2020). #MeToo is also a hashtag that has been taken up across different languages and geographical contexts—an aspect that has to date not been fully explored (Quan-Haase et al., 2021). While #MeToo has been studied for its efficacy, potential, and limitations as a form of digital feminist mobilization (Clark-Parson, 2021; Fileborn & Loney-Howes, 2019; Loney-Howes et al., 2022; Mendes et al., 2019a; Trott, 2021), it also provides an opportunity to investigate the different modes of hashtag use across languages that drive the differential evolution of hashtag activism.

Research on #MeToo has proliferated in recent years with studies examining the spread of the hashtag (Trott, 2021), its intersectional aspects (Fileborn & Loney-Howes, 2020), how it interacts with existing campaigns and hashtags (Dey, 2020; Edmé, 2020; Pain, 2021), and its connection with contemporary feminism (Bracewell, 2021). This has provided important insights into the movement and the use of hashtags to create awareness, mobilize, and effect larger social change. But hashtag movements are not static. For instance, Booten (2016) coined the term “hashtag drift” based on their study of political hashtags on Tumblr. While social media users initially used new hashtags in ways consistent with other users, the use of the hashtag became more diversified and adapted to users’ individual contexts over time. While changes in the use of a hashtag can help a movement (Booten, 2016), it can also foster backlash (Manikonda et al., 2018). Although examining hashtags across languages is a difficult methodological task, this type of analysis is important in furthering our understanding of digital activism more broadly, and hashtag activism specifically. We use language as a proxy for understanding possible geographical and cultural differences within the #MeToo movement. Little research exists to date that examines how a globalized social movement like #MeToo evolves across different socio-cultural contexts (for one notable exception, see Lee & Murdie, 2021). While we have selected English, Mandarin, and German, we make no claim that these are the three most important languages to study. Instead, our study contributes to the literature by attending to how a hashtag can simultaneously retain a universalized essence—in this case, giving space to witness the testimonials of sexual assault survivors—while equally being modulated by more localized discourses that are contingent upon specific socio-spatial frames which divergently narrativize how this movement is understood. Attending to these differences enables scholars to further understand the unique socio-cultural specificities of a digitalized connective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013) without assuming that the movement is statically performed across space. This is particularly important, as social media’s networking affordances have facilitated new possibilities for transnational social movements that spill beyond the space in which they are initialized (Earl & Kimport, 2011). Building off this, we ask: How was the #MeToo movement taken up and used in different ways in the first 12 months across three languages: English, Mandarin, and German? What vernacular practices emerged and how do they change across time and these languages?

There were two main reasons for the choice of languages. The first was theoretical, as our previous research had investigated the vernacular practices of the first 24 hr of the English-language Twitter activity related to #MeToo (Nau et al., 2022). While we therefore had a sense of the vernacular practices in English, we did not know if or how these might shift across languages. The second was practical, based both on the need to limit the number of languages to keep the dataset feasible, but also by including languages spoken by the members of the research team. While we could have included other languages in our dataset (Spanish), we made a conscious decision to include both widely spoken languages (English and Mandarin) and those that are popular, but often as a second or third language (German). Google Trends (n.d.) data also show that #MeToo was a widely searched term in English- and German-speaking languages, while previous research has shown how #MeToo became a popular topic on Chinese diaspora social network sites (Sun, 2020). While English and Mandarin and the world’s two most spoken languages, including German in the dataset aligns with calls from scholars to not simply focus on the most popular or visible campaigns, cases, or datasets, or in this case languages, but to search out those that may be overlooked that are empirically or theoretically significant (see Clark-Parsons, 2022; Mendes et al., 2019a).

Finally, although we acknowledge that there are many translations of #MeToo—including in the languages we are studying (see Zeng, 2019), we chose to use the English hashtag for practical reasons. Translating a hashtag is not so straightforward. For example, in the Chinese context, several hashtags emerged as the #MeToo movement spread to China. This included #MiTu, #RiceBunny, #WoYeShi, or #俺也一样, a dialect form of #MeToo in China) (Zhang, 2019). Some of these variations were created to circumvent censorship on domestic social media platforms, which may not be applied in a less censored platform like Twitter. Also, a search for its variations, such as #我也是 (literal translation of “MeToo” in Mandarin), on Twitter yields results that are unrelated to the #MeToo movement. For these reasons, we decided to include the English #MeToo hashtag.

We ground our analysis in the concept of vernacular practices, “genres of communication” (Gibbs et al., 2015) that emerge on social media platforms shaped by technological affordances of these platforms in combination with cultural, political, geographical, and historical contexts. In a previous study (Nau et al., 2022), we had identified five “grammars” present in the first 24 hr of the #MeToo hashtag going viral: (1) personal disclosures; (2) the use of euphemisms to convey an experience without naming it; (3) speaking to the void; (4) the practice of not naming perpetrators; and (5) signaling participation without disclosure through practices such as voicing solidarity for survivors. We build on this previous research by examining how #MeToo evolved in English, German, and Mandarin tweets over the course of a year after the hashtag first went viral. To address this, we explore the different #MeToo vernacular practices over time and across languages.

Our research was designed to analyze tweets posted in the first 12 months after the hashtag went viral, between October 2017 and September 2018. Our final sample included 960 English tweets, 960 German tweets, and 753 Mandarin tweets. We identified three new, and times overlapping, vernacular practices: spotlighting, interconnectivity, and meta conversations. A key argument we develop is that these emerging vernacular practices do important political work of showing how the personal is political. In other words, we see how the vernacular practices in the hashtag move away from personal disclosures of sexual violence toward connecting it to broader political structures.

Hashtag Activism

In recent years, the participatory features of social media have influenced peoples’ participation in civic and political life (Boulianne, 2015). Hashtag activism, as one way people engage in political activities on social media, has demonstrated its potential for connecting and mobilizing the actions of marginalized groups (Williams, 2015) and bridging the boundaries between different linguistic, geographical, and cultural contexts in social movements (Hasunuma & Shin, 2019). Meanwhile, the decentralized nature of hashtag activism allows the emergence of various dynamic networks that serve as “conversation-expansion tactics” (Clark, 2014), as it scales up and forms collective and/or connective actions (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013). According to Yang (2016), the unfolding of hashtag activism is a temporal process where people categorize, understand, and participate by reading and posting content with the same hashtag. The temporal unfolding of hashtag activism allows opportunities for creating larger narratives and framing processes (Hon, 2016), where the hashtag is picked up in different ways that may or may not align with its original expectation. As one of the most high-profile feminist hashtag campaigns situated within a broader ecology of digital activism (Loney-Howes et al., 2022), #MeToo can be understood from the perspective of how the movement evolves along with the diffusion of the hashtag among dispersed Twitter users over time.

Vernacular Practices

The participatory and discursively pluralizing features of social media have had several important consequences for how people “creatively” self-mediate to collectively produce discourses within “ordinary” and “everyday” spaces, free from the editorial control of elite media gatekeepers (Burgess, 2006, p. 206). To think through this issue, we draw upon the concept of platform vernacular to better understand how the Twittersphere modulates communication simultaneously through its technical design, as well as the host of socio-cultural locations that users contribute from. Defined by Gibbs et al. (2015) as the “unique combination of styles, grammars, and logics” (p. 257) that emerge and develop across different social media platforms, platform vernacular has proven a useful tool for understanding how the dominant “genres of communication” that emerge on platforms are shaped by technological affordances. Yet, while technological affordances play a material role in what can be produced, its length, and its basic form (boyd, 2010; Papacharissi, 2009), it would be a mistake to assume that social practice and modes of expression are dictated by technological affordances. Instead, technological affordances in combination with cultural, political, geographical, and historical contexts shape not only what is possible or likely, but the dominant vernacular practices that emerge, trend, and compete for vernacular hegemony (Warfield, 2016).

Furthermore, vernacular practices do not remain static, and often evolve over time and space. It is imperative that scholars not assume social media users will produce the same results within different social movements and must pay close attention to uncovering various nuances in how these movements unfold, connect, and operate over time across digital spaces (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013; Papacharissi, 2016). Yet to date, few studies have explored how vernacular practices within the same campaign have changed (see Mendes et al., 2019b). Drawing from Papacharissi (2016), our research is fundamentally interested in how the “prevailing tendencies of expressivity and connectivity” (p. 312) change as networked publics assert agency and attempt to claim power.

How Hashtags Evolve Within a Social Movement

As an indexing system in digitally networked campaigns, the hashtag has the intertextual potential to link a broad range of texts on a given topic as it is picked up along the diffusion of campaigns enabled by social media (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015). In hashtag activism, which “happens when large numbers of postings appear on social media under a common hashtagged word, phrase or sentence with a social or political claim” (Yang, 2016, p. 13), Yang identifies the co-production of narratives by hashtagging their personal thoughts, emotions, and stories during the temporal unfolding of the incidence. During this process, the generic conventions and rhetorical devices used in hashtagged posts encourage audience participation and guide the process of “uptake” (Yang, 2016). While hashtags play a key role in framing accompanying texts and their indexical meanings (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015), they have also demonstrated the potential to transform a local story into a national or transnational organizing effort (Conley, 2014; Yuce et al., 2014), and reframe discussion over the course of hashtag activism (Jackson & Welles, 2015). This is indicative of the dynamic ways that people categorize and understand the activism during the process of “uptake.” We contend that understanding the cultural and spatial dimensions of hashtag diffusion within the Twittersphere reveals the variable ways in which people creatively self-mediate their adoption of a hashtag, how they reflect upon it, and ultimately transform meaning(s) through both the contingencies of the “everyday” local to them (Burgess, 2006), and through the dominant communicative practices of the platform in question.

Our work is thus situated within a body of literature that examines language as an important factor in the evolution of hashtags. Bruns et al. (2013) identify the different patterns by English, Arabic, and mixed-language Twitter users during the popular revolution in Egypt and the civil war in Libya. Their findings show that the makeup of the audiences of #egypt and #libya streams over the course of 2011 changed substantially, and the interactions and information exchanges between the three linguistic groups presented dynamic patterns during the period. Through posting tweets in both English and Arabic, the mixed-language group played a role in bridging the two language spheres that potentially contributed to forming support across national and language boundaries for local actions. Moreover, researchers also pay attention to language’s role in amplifying and spreading strategic framing in connective actions as hashtags diffuse transnationally (Knüpfer et al., 2022). For example, Knüpfer et al. (2022) consider language as a proxy for the two major country groups, Germany–Austria and the United Kingdom–United States, in the “120 decibels” campaign initiated by Austrian and German far-right activists in 2018, which saw the co-opting of #MeToo by far-right and ethno-nationalist activists to advance racist policy demands based on “Western” cultural values. This highlights the potential for #MeToo to be exploited for purposes that do not align with or may even be harmful to the original movement as it spread across different languages. The study suggests that German-Austrian initiators strategically linked their agenda to the #MeToo-related debates by latching on to previously existing US and UK communities to amplify and spread their agenda. The dynamic interactions between the progressive and right-wing forces on the Twittersphere are manifested in the distinguished patterns of tweets written in the two languages from the first and second 24 hr of the campaign.

Research on MeToo Across Geographical/Social Contexts

The #MeToo movement offers a suitable space for thinking through the “glocal” dimensions of a hashtag-activated social movement (Almeida & Chase-Dunn, 2018), enabling scholars to consider the ways that this hashtag both converged into universal challenges of institutionalized sexual violence, while also diverging into localized translations (e.g., #BalanceTonPorc in France, or #RiceBunny in China). The “Me Too Rising” project suggests that #MeToo is global in scale, as evidenced through Google Trends data that index daily searches of the phrase and map the geographical location of these searches at a city level (Me Too Rising, 2018). More specifically, #MeToo scholarship has sought to attend to different national contexts, with most early studies on the movement having been skewed toward North America and Europe (see Boyle, 2019; Mendes et al., 2018; Quan-Haase et al., 2021), although this is changing. Scholarship continues to grow about #MeToo and related movements in the Global South, particularly in India, China, and South and Central America (see Chandra & Erlingsdóttir, 2020; Dey & Mendes, 2022; Edmé, 2020; Pain, 2021; Zeng, 2019). To date, however, few studies have conducted comparative geographical research of the movement (Lopez et al., 2019; Zacchia et al., 2019). While connective action may underlie and foster the potential for transnational, global social movements, including #MeToo, Quan-Haase et al. (2021) suggests that comparative research may help elucidate the various opportunity structures, and wider socio-political context that can animate and inhibit social action within bounded national spaces.

Research appears to substantiate this point (David, 2020; Hasunuma & Shin, 2019; Lee & Murdie, 2021). In an analysis of approximately 35,000 global, multi-lingual #MeToo tweets from 2019, Lee and Murdie (2021) found that the volume of tweets within a national context are substantively predicted by domestic political opportunity structures that are characterized as open, democratic, and protective of minority rights. Work by Hasunuma and Shin (2019) also argued that socio-cultural differences in gender-based norms, apparent in media framing of #MeToo and publicized cases of sexual violence, distinctively shaped the appearance of the movement in South Korea and Japan, respectively. Hasunuma and Shin (2019) suggested that the #MeToo movement in Japan was inhibited by norms of “social harmony” that privatize sexual violence, whereas in South Korea, a burgeoning landscape of feminist activism emboldened women to “speak out.” Taken together, research indicates that the “local” remains highly relevant to digitally mediated activism (see also Lopez et al., 2019), and that despite the perceived ease of participation within online activism, there remain significant tolls and harms that feminist activists endure when documenting their experiences online (Mendes et al., 2019a), and these experiences may be differentially felt across lines of nationality, race, sexuality, and gender-identity.

Method

The tweets for this study were collected through the Twitter API (academic research access, see Twitter, 2022) using “Tweepy,” a Python-based software application designed for Twitter data access. We collected tweets containing the #MeToo hashtag in English, German, and Mandarin using the Twitter language codes “en,” “de,” and “zh.” Based on the content of the tweets, we concluded that they came from multiple locations, such as the United States and United Kingdom for English and Germany and Austria for German. Because Twitter has been banned in China since 2009 (Barry, 2022), we suspect that many of the Mandarin tweets may have been sent from abroad or from China through virtual private networks (VPNs). These circumstances make it impossible to know the location of the users, and as a result, all conclusions about vernacular practices in this study will be drawn for languages, not countries or regions.

We collected tweets between October 2017, the month where the #MeToo hashtag first went viral, and September 2018. A random date was generated for each month and 80 tweets were collected for that day in each of the three languages. This approach generated 960 tweets for English, 960 tweets for German, and 753 tweets for Mandarin.

We followed the Association of Internet Researchers (franzke et al., 2020) ethical guidelines when conducting this research, including protecting the privacy and confidentiality of Twitter users. This means we anonymized all tweets and do not use direct quotes except for verified accounts and high-profile celebrities. Our API only enabled us to collect public tweets, meaning any private tweets or those that had been deleted were excluded in this sample. News sources were not included in the data set. Moreover, all tweets that had been collected but were no longer available on Twitter at the time of analysis were deleted from the dataset.

We investigated these datasets using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Thematic analysis is a “method for identifying, analysing and reporting patterns (themes) within data” (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 79) that describes a data set in rich detail and allows researchers to interpret various aspects of a topic. Our approach can be described as a theory-driven thematic analysis because we used vernacular practices (Gibbs et al., 2015) as a framework to guide the search for themes. Following the process outlined by Braun and Clarke (2006), our analysis included the following steps:

1. The research team conducted an informal review of the data and noted initial ideas. Each member reviewed the English tweets and, if applicable, another language (native speakers of all three languages were represented).

2. We then generated a set of initial codes based on the learnings from all three datasets, with codes representing elements of vernacular practices.

3. These elements were grouped into themes, overarching vernacular practices that were present in all three languages and connected with practices previously identified (Nau et al., 2022).

4. The themes were then applied to the data and continually refined based on the outcomes of the coding process and further team discussions.

Upon completion of this process, we composed a report detailing vernacular practices of #MeToo across the three languages. Previous research identified five vernaculars that emerged within the first 24 hr of the #MeToo movement (Nau et al., 2022). While all these vernacular practices persisted across our dataset, albeit in varying frequencies, we also identified three new practices: spotlighting, interconnectivity, and meta conversations.

Findings

Spotlighting

The first new vernacular practice we identified is spotlighting. We conceptualize spotlighting as a vernacular practice in which a person shares information or an experience with their followers, with the exception of personal disclosure, which is its own vernacular practice. Spotlighting emphasizes or highlights certain dimensions of the movement, as well as general aspects of gender-based and sexual violence, with content typically comprising other people’s stories, and experiences, news reports, and events. Spotlighting thus works to frame how conversations occur on the platform by elevating certain content—it is a way of saying “draw your attention here.” Across our three languages, a range of issues were spotlighted, often, though not exclusively, through the practice of retweeting, hyperlinking, or quote-tweeting. As such, spotlighting rarely included original content. We argue that it plays a significant role in moving from the personal to the political in showcasing the pervasive nature, harm, and impact of sexual violence and of structures enabling it.

English Tweets

Across the English dataset, we found many examples of spotlighting. While this was first illustrated by the ways Alyssa Milano’s initial tweet went viral, many others used this practice to bring attention to accusations of sexual violence against high-profile individuals (such as American TV personality Sean Hannity), emerging campaigns (such as #TimesUp), anti-#MeToo campaigns and discourses, discussion about offline protests and campaigns, and quotes from feminist activists or other high-profile #MeToo campaigners, such as Tarana Burke. While spotlighting was often done to validate supportive discourses, anti-#MeToo discourses were also at times widely shared. Here, we witnessed a struggle in understanding how #MeToo was understood—for example, as a movement that “has not gone far enough” versus a movement that has “gone too far.” Much of the English discourse spotlighted tended to be skewed toward the United States, with particular emphasis upon the sphere of electoral politics, and the legitimacy of governance of those officials accused of sexual violence.

German Tweets

Within a month of #MeToo going viral, Twitter users began retweeting, in large numbers, content shared by a Twitter account that specialized in spreading news about sexual harassment and assaults in Germany. These tweets began with the name of the city in which the incident had occurred in hashtag form (e.g., #Hamburg), followed by a brief description of the incident and the suspect or perpetrator. They also included a hyperlink to the news story, as a means of validation. It is also notable how the tweets emphasized incidences of sexual harassment or assault committed in public spaces by strangers, whereas German crime statistics, as in other nations, reveal most of such cases to occur between individuals known to each other, like guardians or friends (Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, 2004). Thus, the tweets can be seen as perpetuating rape myths, “prejudicial, stereotyped, or false beliefs about rape, rape victims, and rapists” (Burt, 1980, p. 217). According to rape myths, sexual assault is a deviant event (Payne et al., 1999) that mainly occurs when women surround themselves with “bad” people. The practice of sharing these tweets may, therefore, reinforce distorted perceptions of sexual violence as an issue primarily caused by “others” without addressing how such violence is embedded into the power dynamics present within families, friendship circles, or workplaces.

Mandarin Tweets

In the Mandarin dataset, we found that individuals often used #MeToo to spotlight two aspects of the movement: barriers to the spread of #MeToo in China due to state censorship, and milestone #MeToo cases in the Chinese context. Spotlighting censorship and suppression toward #MeToo manifested in tweets and retweets focusing on the sanctions exerted on feminist groups and organizations who have been vocal. This included the indefinite removal of the Feminist Voice, a well-known feminist media outlet on Weibo.

Another often spotlighted aspect in the Mandarin tweets was the amplification of milestone #MeToo cases in China, and high-profile cases across countries. Unlike social media platforms in China where #MeToo related content was heavily censored, our dataset suggests Twitter serves as a platform where participants could engage in discussions surrounding high-profile cases that were frequently targeted by censorship across domestic social media platforms. The spotlighting of the high-profile cases in China can be observed in retweeted advertisements of interviews with leading figures in China’s #MeToo movement, such as Zhou Xiaoxuan, known also as Xianzi, who publicly accused Zhu Jun, a host of the state broadcaster CCTV, of sexually harassing her in 2014. We also noted that high-profile cases in South Korea and Japan were spotlighted in our dataset, often through the use of hashtags in local languages, such as #안희정 (Ahn Hee-jung, a former politician in South Korea), #セクハラ and #パワハラ (Japanese translation of “sexual harassment” and “power harassment,” respectively), suggesting the potential of connecting with issues beyond the geographical context associated with the language used in the post. However, low profile #MeToo cases were rarely spotlighted in the dataset. We speculate that our Mandarin dataset mainly captures tweets posted by Chinese diaspora who may be less aware of less well-known #MeToo cases discussed on domestic social media platforms like Weibo (see also Sun, 2020). Some less well-known cases exposed in late July 2018 (NGOMeToo, 2018) may not have been picked up by Twitter users by the time our data collection ended.

Similarities/Differences

As a vernacular practice, spotlighting was persistent across the three languages and was the most dominant vernacular practice identified. It was a valuable practice for connecting the personal to the political; across the languages, users’ content was contextually personalized to underscore extant socio-political conditions. For instance, while the Mandarin tweets spotlighted issues of state censorship, the German tweets often interweaved with the racializing discourse of the refugee crisis, and the English tweets were comprised of American-centric discussions of mid-term elections, and the presidency of Donald Trump. This echoes the work of Bennett and Segerberg (2013) who argue that this type of hashtag activism, without formalized leadership, enables the personalization of collective action frames, such that people read into an event through their own interpretative lens. Spotlighting allows for certain information to be selectively accorded more weight, which consequently impacts how a movement, like #MeToo is narrativized.

Interconnectivity

The practice we refer to as “interconnectivity” involves establishing connections between #MeToo and various events or facts that pertain to an individual’s personal life or are found on a broader, societal level. In this way, interconnectivity is a form of spotlighting in the sense that it focuses readers’ attention, but works specifically to link #MeToo with real-life, and often local occurrences. As a vernacular practice, interconnectivity frames the interpretation of #MeToo by making explicit connections between personal experiences and broader, often localized cultures.

English Tweets

The vernacular practice of interconnectivity emerged quickly after the movement’s inception. In the English dataset, it was visible within a week of #MeToo emerging. While early instances of interconnectivity often incorporated the vernacular practice of personal disclosure—as people linked personal experiences to the movement, it soon went beyond individual disclosure to pointing out the pervasiveness of sexual violence across a plurality of cultural spaces. For instance, people sought to steer #MeToo toward specific communities and their particularized experience of sexual violence. In practice, these tweets reflect an intersectional disposition toward framing the #MeToo movement; examples of this include visualizing #MeToo within Black, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual and queer or questioning (LGBTQ) + communities, as well as examining the role of fatphobia within institutional responses to sexual violence.

As the year progressed, #MeToo was often linked to high-profile court cases, such as US Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, who was tried and convicted of sexually assaulting hundreds of young girls under the guise of medical treatment. Although he was indicted before #MeToo, his trial took place in November 2017, just weeks after the hashtag went viral. Many tweets linked the ways victim/survivors were not listened to as part of a broader rape culture that #MeToo intervened in. Others used this case to “talk back” (hooks, 1989) to those who criticized #MeToo for supposedly going too far. Beyond these high-profile cases, interconnectivity included calls for attention to those whose experiences of abuse had long been ignored.

German Tweets

Like what we found in the English data, linking #MeToo to high-profile events was a frequent practice in the German tweets. Within days of the hashtag spreading through social media, tweets appeared that linked #MeToo to a series of sexual assaults that occurred on the 2015 new year’s night in Cologne which had involved numerous suspects of presumed migrant background (Wolf & Bensch, 2020)—reinforcing the notion that sexual violence and immigration are interconnected. Later, in 2018, many tweets addressed allegations of sexual violence against television director Dieter Wedel, which had become public through reporting by Zeit Magazin in January of 2018 (Simon & Wahba, 2018). Several tweets interconnected to English tweets referring to Wedel as “the German Harvey Weinstein.” However, the idea that the allegations against Wedel “launched” #MeToo in Germany was also contested, with several Twitter users criticizing that victims who had previously come forward had been ignored. Altogether, the practice of interconnectivity in the German data reveals underlying struggles of defining the movement, with some users characterizing certain events and people as intrinsic to #MeToo and others rejecting these connections as shortsighted.

Mandarin Tweets

The Mandarin practice of interconnectivity includes connecting #MeToo with a range of larger societal issues. The tweets interconnect with ongoing discussion and critiques of sex education provided by Chinese institutions and colleges (Peng & Xie, 2014). Our findings suggest that #MeToo provided an opportunity to connect the issue of sexual violence to broader discussions of sex education in China, and how education is one tool to combat it.

In another example, several tweets connected #MeToo to news about an award-winning book concerning the traumatic experience of a young girl raped by her teacher. The author, Lin Yihan, died by suicide in 2017 before #MeToo began, and drew from her own experiences in the novel, published shortly before her death. As #MeToo started making waves, Lin’s novel and her image as a victim and a protester (Huang et al., 2021) re-emerged in public discourse as she and her book were connected to #MeToo through URLs, retweets, and quote tweets to relevant content.

Similarities/Differences

While #MeToo initially functioned as a device to connect personal and individual experiences with systemic sexual violence, over time, through the vernacular practice of interconnectivity, people began to make both explicit and implicit connections between the pervasiveness of sexual violence, with hidden and oft-refuted forces such as internalized misogyny, homophobia, racism, and rape culture. In this sense, the vernacular practice of interconnectivity builds off of spotlighting, but with the specific purpose of drawing connections between #MeToo and other events, incidents, structures. In doing so, it helps to reframe sexual violence from the personal, to the political.

Meta Discourse

The final new vernacular practice that we witnessed emerging was what we call meta discourses, which focuses users’ attention in to the “bigger picture” of what #MeToo means or has accomplished. As such, instead of being used to disclose personal experiences or share solidarity and support for the movement as was witnessed in the first 24 hr, this vernacular practice included discussions about how the movement emerged, and its effects on various aspects of society and culture, gender-based and sexual violence, and gender relationships. These tweets therefore were explicitly political in that they shared analysis and commentary about #MeToo as a local, national, or international phenomenon. In doing so, they may shape how #MeToo is understood in mainstream discourses and evaluate the validity of the ideas that the movement carries.

English Tweets

Although some meta discourses began within a few weeks of #MeToo going viral, most emerged in the preceding months. This was particularly true coming up to the first anniversary of the hashtag, when the public and pundits took the opportunity to reflect on what changed (or not) over the past 12 months. While there certainly was some hope, there also emerged many discussions about the extent to which things haven’t changed. Many tweets reflected on the poor ways sexual violence survivors have been treated in the media, and how they continued to be disbelieved. Others noted how popular cultural events like the annual Burning Man festival have been impacted, for needing to consider how they can promote consent and reduce instances of sexual violence in the wake of #MeToo.

Other popular meta discourses that persisted throughout the period of observation, although qualitatively diverged according to the case, was the shaming of public figures, including celebrities (e.g., commentary on sexual assault allegations against Aziz Ansari in January 2018) and politicians (e.g., US Senator Roy Moore) as noteworthy examples for demonstrating the nexus of power and sexual violence. Yet another meta discourse that emerged early, and persisted throughout observation, was the use of statistical language for quantifying the pervasiveness of sexual violence, particularly against women, in addition to empirically validating that this is, indeed, a common lived experience. The use of statistics also demonstrated the frequency of experiences that go unreported to local authorities, serving as a critique of the criminal justice system in handling such cases. This was especially apparent during Dr Christine Blasey-Ford’s testimony to the US Senate, which served a strategic rhetorical function for pushing back against Republican political pundits who were critical of the timing of Dr Blasey-Ford’s testimony in relation to Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing as a Supreme Court justice. As the #MeToo movement proceeded, further conversations emerged—particularly in the lead up to International Women’s Day on 8 March 2018—regarding the globality of the movement, with some users contributing and amplifying content that was contemplative about the status of the movement around the world.

German Tweets

In the German tweets, meta discourses began within a month of the hashtag spreading when the popular television talk show Markus Lanz dedicated an episode to discussing #MeToo—and only invited men. Lanz’s guests were skeptical of the movement. They articulated concerns about #MeToo disregarding the due process of law and expressed hesitation to flirt with women over a fear to be accused of sexual harassment. One compared #MeToo with a “witch hunt” against men. Some Twitter users applauded the talk show for articulating “uncomfortable truths.” However, the main reaction on Twitter was outrage, with many users calling out the show for not inviting women to the conversation and reporting about #MeToo and sexual violence without nuance.

The tweets surrounding the Markus Lanz talk show reflect a broader pattern of meta discourse in the German-speaking data where #MeToo was openly debated. Frequently, users expressed frustration over mainstream media not understanding the purpose of #MeToo and amplifying the voices of people who were oblivious to structural sexual violence or even hostile to the movement. This was often the case when news stories amplified rape myths, such as conflating sex with sexual exploitation or concentrating on men’s apprehension over potential false accusations. Some users responded by pointing out the role of power dynamics in gendered violence, others simply stated they were “tired” or “feeling sick” in the face of such reporting. These discourses highlight how #MeToo in the German-speaking Twittersphere, became a proverbial battleground between those who attempted to re-define stereotyped perceptions about sexual violence and those who defended them.

Mandarin Tweets

Like the other datasets, the practice of meta discourse became more frequent as the movement over time. Although Twitter has been banned in mainland China since 2009, leaving access via VPN sparsely available, it has been a space where the Chinese diaspora engaged in emerging conversations about #MeToo. The Chinese diaspora’s perception of the #MeToo movement demonstrates its variety and nuances (Sun, 2020). We observed that in the Mandarin tweets, meta discourse is often constructed by comparing the #MeToo development and impact in China with other countries. For example, discussions focused on the lack of reaction to #MeToo in China compared with the repercussions in other countries like Japan. However, with a comparative lens, some tweets view the impact of #MeToo in Western countries as overreacting.

Not surprisingly, in the Mandarin dataset, meta discourses around the movement have become a site where anti-women and anti-feminist ideas emerged. For example, some attribute gender-based inequality in workplaces to the movement, such as a hesitancy to employ women. Conversations around false accusation are a theme that questions #MeToo’s legitimacy. Even in the Mandarin dataset, we saw a focus on high-profile and controversial cases, such as Dr Christine Blasey Ford, which some argued was a conspiracy against conservatives in the United States. Meanwhile, some tweets also tried to show a balanced perspective commenting that “overall, it’s worth it.”

Similarities/Differences

When looking at tweets in all languages, meta discourse was one of the later vernacular practices to emerge and became more common as time passed. While meta discourses were prominent coming up to the 1-year anniversary of the movement, they also emerged in response to regional, national, or international events, enabling the public to speak about the movement in a high-level, reflective, or more intellectual way.

Across all languages, for example, the #MeToo movement was often transformed by mainstream discourses into a panic about false accusations. These discourses had a strong anti-#MeToo sentiment. In the English and German dataset, we saw meta discourses that acknowledged that sexual violence was something that not only happened to women by men, but was complicated and nuanced. We saw discourses highlighting men as targets of sexual violence and its impact on LGBTQ + communities. In our Mandarin dataset we witnessed the largest divergence of meta discourses. Here we witnessed conversations about how #MeToo was suppressed by the Chinese state, how the movement had limited impact on legislative change, and broader discussions about what was perceived to be an over-reaction in Western nations versus a lack of reaction in China.

Discussion

Drawing on a thematic analysis of 960 tweets for English, 960 tweets for German, and 753 tweets for Mandarin, this article explores the vernacular practices across the #MeToo movement in the first 12 months. Through exploring vernacular practices, we found we were able to provide insights into a bigger question—what happened to #MeToo after its launch? Has its use and purpose changed as it grew, expanded, and was taken up by people around the world? We argue that indeed it has. For example, we identified how some vernacular practices, such as personal disclosures of sexual violence, which had previously been identified within the first 24 hr became rare as the movement unfolded. This suggests that while personal disclosures may have been prominent in the early stages of #MeToo, in the English dataset at least—it was a vernacular practice that appears to have diminished over time. We believe this change in vernacular practice is linked to the emergence of new vernacular practices. This is, for example, epitomized by the emergence of meta discourses, giving the public a chance to connect broad systems of oppression to sexual violence, and various cultures that uphold this. It is further exemplified within the practice of interconnectivity, whereby users attempted to steer conversation toward certain fields of social life, demonstrating how #MeToo was used to explore a variety of institutional spheres. However, perhaps the most important was the practice of spotlighting, whereby certain content was curated and selectively narrativized to highlight some forms of content. As Bennett et al. (2014, p. 245) argue in their analysis of the #Occupy movement, crowd-based digital activism on Twitter often utilizes the “retweet” as a mechanism for curation in determining “what is of interest” through indexically elevating certain types of content over others. Thus, as the movement progressed, and fewer people were sharing personal disclosures of sexual violence, we view spotlighting as serving an amplificatory function in cognitively organizing where and what our attention is drawn to within the #MeToo movement.

Throughout this article, we argue that these emerging vernacular practices are significant because they connect individual experiences of sexual violence to broader political structures such as patriarchy, homophobia, xenophobia, and racism. Yet, as our analysis uncovered, while the vernacular practices enabled #MeToo to be politicized, these systems of oppression were not always challenged, but at times reinforced. This is particularly true in the case of Germany, where these vernacular practices reinforced xenophobic and racist ideas about immigrants and perpetuated the rape myths that sexual violence is usually perpetrated by strangers. Overall, the article contributes to scholarship in the field of new media, feminism, and communication by showing how hashtags are taken up by the public in different ways, and how shared vernacular practices emerge across languages, even when the content, focus, or rhetoric may diverge.

As we examine the English phrase #MeToo across three separate languages, it is important to emphasize how Twitter users function as interlocutors for their audiences, willfully translating, and consequently narrativizing how the movement is perceived as an event. In this sense, language is not understood as a neutral device for grasping reality, but serves a functional role in actively constructing it, as meanings are politically and culturally relative to the “socio-cultural background” of people (Schäffner, 2004). As Baker (2007) argues, the way in which translation renders something as sensible is not “random” but operates as a “concrete political activity” (p. 157). In other words, we must think of how the translation of #MeToo across geographic contexts is interweaved within a “constellation of beliefs, values, and activities,” (Baker, 2009, p. 223) such that the movement becomes contested through the dominant ideological frameworks of a user’s location.

This enables us to understand how #MeToo can simultaneously function as a critical discourse of patriarchal social orders, as a movement for fostering support between survivors and the general public, in addition to being utilized as a tool for re-certifying existing rape myths. This was especially noted within the Mandarin dataset, where several tweets sought to individualize the response to sexual violence as a matter of personal protection, or within the German tweets, where users were highly critical of the mainstream media’s coverage of #MeToo as being woefully uncritical, or racializing sexual violence as an issue of the foreign “other.” The latter is significant as it exemplifies how the #MeToo movement became narratively embedded within another political discourse regarding the migrant and refugee crisis of Germany in the 2010s (Karakayali, 2018). This further instructs our attention toward the ways that hashtag activism—namely, the mediation of social movements via social media—always possesses the latent potential for what Knüpfer et al. (2022) refer to as hashtag “hijacking,” through which political actors (re)appropriate an existing discourse to reframe it within their own ideological lens to “disrupt and undermine the goals of the initial movement” (p. 1015). We contend that this article makes important contributions to our conceptualizing of hashtag activism as a form of connective action, demonstrating how the lack of centralized organization means that “personalized, digitally mediated collective action formations” (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013, p. 25) can transform and be multitudinously appropriated in ways not necessarily intended.

The emergence of new vernacular practices as the movement progressed further suggests that #MeToo is not a static discourse, but a temporally fluid event that stimulated new readings. This suggests that we ought to further examine how #MeToo was rendered inter-textually as a diverging set of meta discourses existing coterminously in relation to one another. For instance, earlier research has demonstrated how the movement functioned as a space for disclosing personal experiences of sexual violence within the first 24 hr (Nau et al., 2022), yet we found that this practice became increasingly less noticeable as the movement progressed. Instead, #MeToo often served as a critical discursive tool for calling recognition to the pervasiveness of sexual violence, and the institutionalization of such violence. It also carved itself as a distinctive moment that people could reflect upon over time, examining the movement’s progression, including its successes and failures. This calls further attention to understanding how social media affords what boyd (2010) refers to as replicability, or the ability to augment, and transform content as it (re)circulates. It suggests that we ought to further explore the unintended trajectories of “connective actions” on social media to understand how the reading of a message is transformed across time, space, and languages.