From Fragmented Narratives to Systemic Critiques: Long-Term Transformations in Korean Twitter Discourse on Sexual Violence

This study examines how the #MeToo movement reshaped long-term public discourse on sexual violence in South Korea. While research has documented the surge of attention following prosecutor Seo Ji-hyun’s 2018 disclosure, little is known about how the movement reorganized the broader discursive field beyond the initial moment of crisis. Drawing on discursive institutionalism, we argue that #MeToo acted as a discursive shock that consolidated previously fragmented conversations into more coherent and durable interpretive frameworks. Using an 8-year corpus of 351,582 Korean-language tweets (2015–2023), we apply Dirichlet Multinomial Regression topic modeling and time-series analysis to identify shifts in both topical content and discursive structure. Our findings show a transition from episodic, emotion-driven narratives to stable, thematic frames emphasizing human rights, systemic discrimination, and institutional accountability. We further demonstrate increasing convergence between social media and mainstream news, indicating diffusion and stabilization of these new frames. The results suggest that digital activism can produce enduring transformations in public meaning, illuminating how social movements institutionalize discourse over time.