ABSTRACT
What follows when women publicly accuse powerful senior men of sexually assaulting them? This chapter compares a large corpus of tweets regarding two widely publicized sexual abuse allegations of two women in Japan and South Korea. While feminist online activism has received scholarly attention, it is relatively limited to Anglophone users or single-country studies. We retroactively collected tweets in Japanese and Korean between 2017 and 2020, using the names of two female accusers and two accused men. Semantic network analysis revealed that the discourse on Twitter focused on political debates on national scandals rather than on gender-based violence in both Japan and South Korea. It also showed the absence of feminist solidarity in Japan. This chapter contributes to the literature on feminist activism and textual analysis of tweets.
