JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The #MeToo movement, initiated in 2006 and amplified on social media in 2017, mobilized women globally to share experiences of sexual harassment and assault online. While the movement increased awareness, it also revealed deep social divisions in digital spaces. Supportive discussions promoted solidarity and healing, whereas antagonistic responses reinforced backlash and secondary victimization. In India, the Indian Entertainment Industry (IEI), became a focal point where survivors’ disclosures highlighted structural gender inequalities. These polarized reactions function as digital-health signals, reflecting stigma, psychosocial distress, and conditions that shape women’s safety and mental well-being. Examining these narratives as indicators of public-health risk helps identify patterns of structural inequity and secondary mental-health burdens among survivors.

Objective:

This study examined online discourse surrounding #MeToo to identify forms of system-justifying narratives on social media and to assess how #MeTooIndia exposed institutional inequities within the IEI.

Methods:

This mixed-methods study comprised two components. In Study 1, natural language processing was applied to analyze global #MeToo Twitter discourse. From an initial corpus of 350,000 tweets, 205,082 were preprocessed, and sentiment and stance detection analysis identified 18,416 tweets expressing negative attitudes toward the movement. Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling extracted 22 topics, 12 of which aligned with system-justification categories, revealing distinct lexical and semantic patterns related to gender, institutional, and power dynamics. Two trained coders manually annotated a subsample to ensure conceptual clarity and inter-rater reliability. Study 2 involved qualitative, semi-structured interviews with 20 academic experts in film, gender, and media studies to gather opinions on how #MeTooIndia influenced institutional discourse in the IEI and how these dynamics translate into digital and mental-health risks.

Results:

Analysis of #MeToo Twitter discourse in study 1 identified four primary forms of system justification: gender, institutional, backlash, and victim-blaming. Gender and institutional system justifications were the most prevalent, reflecting persistent gender hierarchies and normalized power asymmetries. Study 2 reinforced these findings, revealing how experts perceived #MeTooIndia as both empowering and constrained by entrenched institutional and cultural barriers. Together, our findings highlight the dual function of social media in promoting collective advocacy while reproducing conditions linked to gender-based violence, psychological stress, and reduced help-seeking – key digital and mental-health concerns.

Conclusions:

This mixed-methods study reveals that digital discourse surrounding #MeToo often sustains existing gender and institutional hierarchies rather than dismantling them. Across Twitter data and expert interviews, gender and institutional system justifications emerged as dominant narratives, highlighting how online spaces can reinforce structural inequities while appearing progressive. Although #MeToo amplified visibility and awareness, its potential for lasting institutional change remains limited. These findings underscore the need for trauma-informed digital governance, public-health recognition of online hostility as a psychosocial risk, and frameworks that situate digital activism to institutional reforms that support safety and mental well-being.