Feminist reflections on internet policies

Internet censorship in the name of morality in Pakistan is rampant, and the trend continues to grow as new laws and regulations are introduced. But just a cursory look at this trend reveals that the censorship is not just vague, but also sexist, targeting women's expression and experiences online.

Young Black women are moving away from the "Stong Black Woman" narrative, and using online platforms to redefine digital feminism for them. Fungai Machirori explores how one young Black woman is attempting to hack the system. But is it working?

In the last decade, we have witnessed growing religion-based hate speech online against groups that are seen as minorities or people that are politically, socially, and culturally targeted. In religion-based hate speech it isn’t only religions that are seen as minorities that are the target of hate speech, but also other identities that are seen as “violating” the values and norms of the religions that regard themselves as the majority. Many times that hate speech even results in violence and destruction.

The internet is a space for dissent and democracy but there is no doubt that it has also given space and amplified religion-based hate speech against communities and people. In this editorial Dhyta explores what is hate and what is hate speech, the failure and profit for the state and technology corporations to not address hate speech or to hold anybody accountable, and finally what are the ways that people and communities themselves are doing about the hate speech and trauma they face, often on a daily basis. 

Living under constant fear of being targeted with religious hate and hate speech is a shared experience of Sri Lanka’s Muslim community. In this podcast, journalist and researcher Sara Pathirana talks to Sheikh Arkam Nooramith – a Sri Lankan Islamic scholar, and Ms. Hafsah Muheed – an experienced professional working on gender-based violence and women’s health, about how the community deals with threats by focusing on the message of peace and love.

Gender-based violence is prevalent in Philippines, and it is targeted towards young girls, women and LGBTQI+ communities not just in public spaces by state leaders and known individuals, but also in more private online settings. Impunity in many cases have only enabled perpetrators to continue the violence. This set of comic strips highlights different kinds of gender-based hate speech in the Philippines, and emphasises on collective efforts to fight back.

Despite a boom in dating apps geared towards Muslim community, expectations of “morality” from Muslim women makes dating, and particularly online dating, a daunting experience. This comic strip explores how women are blamed for the intimate partner violence while they also face a barrage of abuse, and adds a layer of religiosity to the discussion that sets strict moral grounds only for women.

Indonesia has celebrated gender diversity even before the country's independence. This is indicated by the existence of five genders in the Bugis (South Sulawesi) tradition, namely: Makunrai (female), Oroane (Male), Calabai (Male with women soul), Calalai (Female with man soul) and Bissu. During the Old Order in Indonesia, some of these groups were targeted, and in the contemporary, there are still remnants of how people are denied freedom of expression around sexuality, and face hate and repression.

Violence has a way of manifesting itself across different platforms – SMS, Zoom, Telegram, Facebook including the newly emerging platforms like Tik Tok and Clubhouse. The problem, therefore, lays not merely in the technology itself, but the underlying logic and profit model that propels the modus operandi of the algorithm, the content moderation policy and all other technologies deployed to run the digital ecosystem.

When certain government or market actions and services were unable to meet the pressing needs of a pandemic and lock downs that, as a result, spiraled out of control, community networks (CNs) demonstrated that they were more than techno solutions to communication. Every location of these community-rooted autonomous sites of communication and knowledge became its own power house of resistance against the risks and inequalities that the pandemic has exacerbated.

In times of crisis, community networks proved that an infrastructure is only as robust as the more caring of its communal nodes. We are glad to present the special edition: Infrastructures of resistance: Community networks hacking the global crisis. Read the editorial article, by Adriana Labardini.

In Vale do Ribeira, São Paulo, Brazil, a group of ecological, quilombola farmer women, in partnership with two feminist organisations: APC and Sempreviva Organização Feminista (SOF), managed to deploy and operate their Wi-Fi mesh network. Bruna Zanolli highlights the importance of building trust, empathy and feminist guidelines in the community so that their internet infrastructure could contribute to creating resilience and not only access to communications and information to the quilombola families.

Marcela Guerra shakes us through her tarot card “The Tower”, raising awareness of the urgent need for a fresh start, for human-centred societies and infrastructures, or perish as Mother Nature agonises, and inequalities are exacerbated.

Upasana Bhattacharjee further builds on this notion of community network not only as a local connectivity infrastructure serving the unserved people and rural areas left out by markets or states, but mainly as a social actor that builds knowledge, autonomy and agency at the local level, through a community-owned infrastructure and organized operation.

Miami Chirilele writes about how Murambinda Works, a community network in North Buhera, Zimbabwe, has been able to connect 108,000 people, and is hacking the crisis bottom-up.

This article situates the role of community networks that strive to deliver on technology’s promise of greater gender equality, making the case for recentring the needs of women and communities in technology-making and connectivity, as infrastructures of resistance in times of crisis.

Kira Allmann’s podcast will transport you to the rural north of the United Kingdom to invite you witness one of the Broadband for the Rural North (B4RN) community network assembly meetings, where knowledge is shared, and empathy transpires.

This article provides insights into the recently passed Cyber Security and Cyber Crimes Act, 2021 in Zambia, from the perspective of Laura Miti, an award-winning human rights defender. Mitri alerts on how this act gives sweeping powers to the government to hush criticism of any kind and curtail freedom of expression and privacy.

The article argues that digital surveillance is part of gendered and racist disciplinary structures, that manifest in specific forms of online gender-based violence experienced by black Muslim women influencers.