#MeToo

The “me too.” movement was founded in 2006 by the survivor and activist Tarana Burke, as survivor-to-survivor support work. It is eleven years older than the hashtag most people mean when they use its name, and the two should not be collapsed: the organization’s own history page draws the distinction explicitly.

An earlier version of this page dated the movement’s founding to 2017. That is the date of the viral hashtag, not of the movement.

The 2017 hashtag

On October 15, 2017, in the weeks after allegations against the film producer Harvey Weinstein became public, the actress Alyssa Milano posted a tweet inviting people who had been sexually harassed or assaulted to reply “me too”. Pew Research Center, analysing Twitter from that date through September 30, 2018, counted more than 19 million uses of the #MeToo hashtag — an average of 55,319 per day across the period. Usage spiked around specific news events rather than running steadily.

What the scale does and does not show

A hashtag count measures posting, not prevalence, and not outcomes. Nau and colleagues, studying how the hashtag was used on Twitter, examine it as a set of vernacular practices — the forms disclosure took and the responses it drew — rather than as a proxy for the incidence of harassment. This page follows that limit: the 19 million figure describes activity on one platform over one period, and nothing more.

Status

The movement is recorded here as active. The me too. organization founded by Burke continues to operate, which is what that status records; it is not a claim about the intensity or reach of the hashtag at any given time.