MeToo Movement
The #MeToo Accusation Scandal was an incident where women on Twitter and social media accused over 80 celebrities and people over sexual assault, rape, and other misconduct. Most of these accusations were false. It is currently going on from 2017 to present.
Start
Trouble on Twitter started on 2017 on October 15th, 2017 when actress Alyssa Milano suggesting victims of sexual misconduct to write "me too" as a reply to her tweet in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment accusations. Eventually, the #MeToo bandwagon started. The bandwagon consisted of users banding together to accuse random celebrities of misconduct, with 80% of the claims reportedly being false. The tweet went viral, getting 25k likes, 13k re-tweets within a day.
There had been reports of worries that some accusations were false. As of now, although some acknowledged the scandal, the trend is still ongoing. Many targets included Harvey Weinstein.
Why This Movement is Rotten
- Some people were accused falsely of misconduct. It almost seems like some people were accused in a way of sport or just wild mass guessing. There are even rumors that the trend could become a "witch-hunt".
- Some people even lost their jobs or were treated poorly from being one of the targets.
- It was too viral, and when a movement gets too big, bad apples such as scammers are sure to pop up.
- Some Social Justice Warriors and Radical feminists used this as an opportunity to encourage “listen and believe” and “guilty until proven innocent” mentality.
- Caused men to become (if possible) even more wary of women and unwilling to work with them, which can bring potential harm to workplace diversity and efficiency. Some women even fear that they will lose job opportunities because they have less chance to showcase their work to their bosses.
- The biggest issue of the movement is that it takes place on social media, and therefore enabling anyone to make any accusation, with or without proof. This is made even worse by the fact that being so much as accused of being a harasser (or worse, a rapist) can severely damage one's reputation.
- It helped certain authoritarian nations such as China (where Twitter is mostly banned and censorship in social media is rampant) to create false pretenses that their own country has a lower MeToo presence (and therefore fewer sexual misconducts) due to their “superior education and culture".
- Asia Argento, one of the founders, was involved in sexual misconduct, making it an ironic movement.
- It forces the "guilty until proven innocent" presumption instead of the "innocent until proven guilty", with the former being more likely of causing a wrong verdict, especially if the accuse truly is innocent and the accuser is falsifying evidence to get free money. Worth noting that it is also a denial of an international human right under the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 11. It basically is a "end justifies the means", which is also untrue.
- It led to Alec Holowka committing suicide after Zoë Quinn accused him of assault. Her one tweet led to the creators of Night in the Woods cutting ties with him, a game he was working on getting canceled, and being blacklist from the games industry in general, without any shred of actual evidence.
Redeeming Qualities
- It gave people a chance to stand up against misconduct, especially in certain fields such as finance.
- It helped unveiled information of many sexual harassers, such as Tyler Malka.
Reception
The MeToo movement has been met with polarizing reactions. Many people support MeToo and Timesup in order to call out powerful men in business and Hollywood. However it has also been accused of allowing dishonest women to accuse innocent men of something they never did either for revenge, attention or even financial gain.
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