me-too

First recorded in 1925–30; from phrase me too

Coined in 2006 by Tarana Burke, African American civil rights activist (born 1973)

Since 2017 MeToo as a hashtag and a movement has been influential in the public reckoning with patriarchal dominance. However, MeToo dates back to 2006 on the social media site Myspace where Tarana Burke coined the phrase as an empathetic response to other survivors of abuse.
In 2017 the hashtag exploded in viral use after a call to activism by American actress Alyssa Milano. Hundreds of thousands of people responded to her post in solidarity, raising awareness of rampant sexist behavior and sexual abuse or harassment.
As a movement, MeToo began with reports of workplace sexual misconduct against women. Many of the high-profile perpetrators were powerful men in the entertainment industry. However, the movement quickly expanded to acknowledge male survivors and people of all socioeconomic strata and many walks of life. While the specific circumstances of their lives and the incidents they endure vary, they’ve all experienced victimization at the hands of some individual in a position of relative authority.
The English hashtag #MeToo has been used all over the globe, and several international versions have been popularized in many languages. The Spanish version #YoTambien is a nearly exact translation, “I also.” In Italian, survivors have posted about “that time when” with #QuellaVoltaChe. The French version is a sentence in the imperative, with #BalanceTonPorc telling women to “squeal on your pig.” In China, when social media platforms censored posts with the hashtag #MeToo or the literal translation #WoYeShi, the creative transliteration “bowl of rice” emoji, pronounced [mee], followed by “bunny” emoji, pronounced [too], became popular.
The English #MeToo, however, remains the cornerstone of the MeToo movement, perhaps because it allows survivors to share as much or as little of their stories as they choose, or because it works for people of diverse backgrounds, social circumstances, and gender identities. The universal nature of this kind of abuse has made the MeToo movement a powerful catalyst for social reform.