Feminist reflections on internet policies

Srinidhi Raghavan, coordinator of the EROTICS Regional Survey 2020, shares her learnings from cross-country feminist research on internet and sexuality through the lens of the Feminist Principles of the Internet.

Srinidhi Raghavan, coordinator of the EROTICS Regional Survey 2020, shares her learnings from cross-country feminist research on internet and sexuality in South Asia. In this first part, the researcher reflects around identity, community agency and language.

This article expresses personal experience of navigating the digital space and learning about digital security in a world filled with neurotypical upper caste people in authority.

Florencia Goldsman reviews the study "Engendering Hate: The contours of state-aligned gendered disinformation online", adding pieces to the puzzle of targeted digital violence that undermines women and LGBTIQ+ people online presences.

What can be done to make the internet healthier? Some of the most compelling answers arise in the very communities that experience the worst online violence plaguing the internet.

In the second and last part of this in-depth article, the author unpacks the persistence of rape myths in judicial reasoning, even veiled under the promises of neutrality and accuracy of digital evidence.

This insightful piece highlights how digital evidence is overwhelming the legal and judicial imagination by looking specifically at cases of rape trials in India.

We welcome Facebook, Google, TikTok and Twitter commitments to tackle online abuse on their platforms, however without ensuring that the systems they create do not reproduce, and amplify existing inequalities. Built-in safety tools will only mitigate harms from the surface.

How does porn take shape based on the audience's perspective and the practice of sharing and commenting on available online content? This article, based on a digital ethnographic analysis of a Reddit community, explores what feminist porn means on the internet.

In India, the digitisation drive of services interlinked with offline violence, marginalisation and stigma make it almost impossible for transgender persons to be considered as people who deserve equal rights. Through the provisions mentioned in the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2019, this article gives us a glimpse of human rights violations and denial of a life with dignity.

The system of integrated biometric database in Kenya, Huduma Namba, exposes multilayered challenges of statelessness, loss of basic human rights and availing government services. Through conversations with Mariam, a Nubian woman, we learn about the tedious and extremely long waiting period to obtain an ID card, without which people from ethnic minorities are not counted as citizens, and are pushed to the margins.

In this paper, researcher Nayantara Ranganathan analyses tweets with the hashtag #metooindia, and examines the possibilities, limits and contradictions of studying a movement through a dataset of tweets centred around a phrase.

CIS has been undertaking a two-year project studying the entry of digital platforms in the domestic and care work in India, supported by the Association for Progressive Communications as part of the Feminist Internet Research Network. Implemented through 2019-21, the objective of the project is to use a feminist lens to critique platform modalities and orient platformisation dynamics in radically different, worker-first ways. Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi led the research team at CIS. The Domestic Workers’ Rights Union is a partner in the implementation of the project, as co-researchers.

This article explores the labour and determination that goes into preserving African women’s history, reclaiming online spaces and, more importantly, ensuring that these stories remain accessible and continue to grow for the future generation to come.

At different times over the past seven years, the Association of Progressive Communications Women’s Rights Programme (APC WRP) project EROTICS: Exploratory Research on Sexuality and the Internet has conducted surveys among its worldwide network of gender and sexuality activists, advocates, professionals and academics. APC launched the EROTICS network in 2009 to begin research in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Lebanon, South Africa and the United States.

In this piece, the author investigates how they witnessed alternative porn that in its core is feminist, queer and diverse on the internet

The Wikipedia gender gap has been well documented for a decade. But are women in the Wikimedia movement in the same situation as a few years ago? What has changed and what still needs to be done?

In this article, three queer-identifying internet users from Pakistan, talk about queer (in)visibility and the precarity of private online spaces for expression.

This article examines the #FreeSenegal protests from a feminist perspective, depicting women's erasure from movements and revolutions in the African continent, and the prevalence of rape culture and sexual violence – even amidst anti-oppression protests.

In July 2019, 26 women from diverse backgrounds met together in Chiapas, Mexico for three days in a hackfeminist meeting on technology and affections to imagine a principle for a feminist internet that centred care for the body, the self, the land – a principle that speaks to promoting respect for human and collective rights and that weaves policies of co-responsibility and interconnection to all life and land.