The ‘Me too’ movement against sexual harassment and assault is sweeping social media

“Me too.”

Those two words that have been repeated millions of times in the last 24 hours on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. They’re posted by women who say they’ve faced sexual harassment and assault. And they show the power and speed that social media can deploy; this one seems reminiscent of “ice bucket challenge” of 2014, but sharper and faster.

Actress Alyssa Milano kicked off the movement yesterday, when she tweeted that a friend had suggested that women who have faced sexual assault and harassment post “Me too” as a status.

Milano’s original tweet currently has more than 40,000 comments.

While Milano started the “Me too” call to action on Twitter, the movement quickly spread to Facebook where, as of 11:30 a.m. ET on Monday, more than 8.7 million users were posting or “talking” about it. And that number is quickly rising.

More than 45 percent of people in the U.S. are friends with someone who has posted a “Me too” status, according to Facebook.

On Twitter, the hashtag #MeToo is trending in several cities. Twitter is giving it an additional push via a moment featuring tweets from actresses Anna Paquin and Debra Messing. And Instagram has more than 300,000 posts associated with the “Me too” hashtag.

Even Facebook executives seem to have been shaken by the movement.

Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, the VP for VR and AR at Facebook, posted on Twitter that the “#metoo campaign strikes me as one of the most powerful things I've seen on Facebook in a while” and acknowledges that men that he’s connected to on Facebook are “statistically likely to have been involved.”

This article has been updated with new data on the “Me too” campaign from Facebook.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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