While the MeToo Movement has generally been accepted as a legitimate response to what was considered endemic sexual harassment and discrimination in Hollywood, its goals and values have nonetheless been questioned and undermined. This study examines the comment sections of two YouTube videos produced by major broadcasting corporations in which the MeToo Movement in Europe is discussed. The comment sections are analysed in terms of expressions of attitude and evaluation, using the Appraisal framework. Through this analysis it is revealed that attitudes expressed in the comments legitimate and normalise anti-feminist ideologies through discursive construction of social norms. Conversely, feminism, as well as immigration, are delegitimated. Commenters delegitimate the MeToo Movement by construing its goals and values as misdirected or insincere. These attitudes are furthermore expressed through dialogically contractive comments, thus constructing them as accepted and matter-offact, rather than ideological. 

Issues surrounding gender disparities in academic publishing, especially for women with children, have long been reported. The pandemic exacerbated and underscored these issues to an even greater extent. This study explores the ways in which experiences of life during lockdown are narrativized by academic mothers in the comment sections of online news articles covering the topic of gender imbalance in academic publishing during the pandemic. Each of the three articles used in the study was published in the early months of the 2020 lockdown, when evidence of gender disparity was still mostly anecdotal. Methodologically, the study first applies membership categorization analysis in order to understand how gender roles in the academy emerge in the online discussions. Second, narrative analysis is applied to investigate how contributors to the comment sections tell stories of their own and others’ experiences. The intensification of personal and professional pressures is represented in the narratives through shrinking space and time. Exploring this as a chronotope, the study shows how the lockdown caused a collapse between the scales of home and work, which was felt deeply by academic mothers.

This chapter examines how an American accent is used in two separate contexts to delegitimate opposing ideologies, highlighting the transitory nature of elements within assemblages. In examining comments on two YouTube documentary videos discussing the aftermath of the MeToo Movement, the study demonstrates how commenters denaturalise two interviewees—a French feminist activist and a Spanish populist politician. Using the Appraisal framework and Delegitimation analysis, the analysis finds that the American accent is recognised as something which does not ‘belong’; however it is conceived as representing two different ideologies: feminism and populism. The American accent can therefore be seen as an ‘adaptable artefact,’ an element of an assemblage which is simultaneously robust in what it signifies and yet malleable in its application.

This study addresses a gap in research on media bias in news coverage, focusing on how news consumers engage with the issue. Using online news site comment sections, the study examines how commenters discuss the issue of Missing White Woman Syndrome, referring to the heightened coverage of cases involving young, white, middle-class women. The study employs a novel approach in applying corpusbased methods for discourse analysis, using 5-grams to identify broader patterns of discourse in the dataset. The Appraisal framework and (de)legitimation are applied to analyse the identified themes in more detail. The study finds that social categories are invoked in order to raise the issue of media bias within the comment sections. However, the study reveals that the media interest is legitimated by other commenters, who attribute the coverage to other elements of the stories, or delegitimate the discussion of prejudice through accusations against those who raise the issue of incivility. Consequently, the conversation around media bias is contracted and the issue constructed as irrelevant.