The Effect of #MeToo on Rape Myths in the Media: A Global Multilingual Analysis

The #MeToo movement has been influential across over 85 countries and has remained an active part of modern feminist movements for since its inception. Scholars have argued that media representations and constructions are an important part of feminist activism and scholarship. This study examines if and how #MeToo has structurally altered the way sexual violence is represented in news media across 47 countries through the frequency of rape myths. Drawing from feminist scholarship that have employed content and thematic analyses to identify the varieties and categories of rape myths, this study employs multilingual natural language processing methods to extend these analyses to an international scale. Drawing from recent methodological developments, GPT-4 is utilized in augmenting qualitative annotations for subsequent model fine-tuning. Bayesian Structural Time Series are subsequently applied to understand the causal impact before and after the movement took off in each country. Scholars have also theorized that countries with greater political openness should be more receptive to change demanded by social movements. We find that, in most countries, the #MeToo movement did not significantly lower the frequency of rape myths in the media, and in the countries that it did the frequency often appeared to revert back to pre-2017 levels by 2022. Political openness did not explain which countries were found to have significant change or not.