Denouncing Sexual Violence: A Cross-Language and Cross-Cultural Analysis of #MeToo and #BalanceTonPorc

#MeToo, a social media movement that denounced sexual violence against women was lauded as a global phenomenon. In this paper, we present a cross-language and cross-cultural quantitative examination of the English #MeToo and French #BalanceTonPorc. The goal of our study was to examine the global to local adoption and personalization of this social media movement. In part one of our study, we sought to understand linguistic differences by comparing #MeToo tweets in English and #BalanceTonPorc tweets in French. In the second part, we sought to understand cultural differences in the way #MeToo was adopted in the US and India. We found that the movement did not share a unified perspective, instead it was shaped by the culture and social reality of the posters; tweets in French were more aggressive and accusing than those in English, while English tweets from India involved more religion and society than those from the US.