The Effect of Structural Affinity on the Diffusion of a Transnational Online Movement: The Case of #MeToo

Social media platforms intrinsically afford the diffusion of social movements like #MeToo across countries. However, little is known about how extrinsic, country-level factors affect the uptake of such a transnational movement. In this paper, we present a macro, comparative study of the transnational #MeToo movement on Twitter across 33 countries. Our aim is to identify how socio-economic and cultural variables might have influenced the in-country scale of participation, as well as the timings of in-country peak surges of messages related to #MeToo. Our results show that total in-country participation over a three-year timeframe is highly related to the scale of participation in peak surges; the scale of in-country participation is related to the population size and income level of the country; and the timings of peak surges are related to the country’s population size, gender equality score, and the language used in messages. We believe these findings resonate with theoretical frameworks that describe the formation of transnational social movements, and provide a quantitative perspective that complements much of the qualitative work in the literature.