April. 2022: Monopolistic digital platforms have taken over our daily lives, which directly impacts the way social movements and civil societies build networks and solidarities across borders. The use of social media as tools for communication, messaging, advocacy, and even mobilization during crucial political moments (e.g., Black Lives Matter, Colombian, and Chilean collective risings) undercuts these platforms’ exploitation and commodification of their users. Most activists use social media platforms to raise awareness and amplify messages among large populations. This piece explores the paradox of social movements utilizing monopolized social media to promote messages of global justice while examining the means by which activists and the larger public can shift to freer and fairer options. This is the tenth piece from a special issue on Bot Populi on Feminist Re-imagining of Platform Planet.
IT for Change is engaged in a project that addresses gender-based hate speech in the online public sphere. Supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada, the project responds to the current reality in India where women are not only speaking up against patriarchy, but also claiming public-political space despite pervasive sexism and misogyny.
It adopts three main strategies: (a) highlighting blind spots in dominant legal frameworks that prevent effective recognition of sexist/misogynistic speech online as a violation of women’s rights; (b) offering ways to reform content governance and intermediary liability legislation to ensure timely redressal; and (c) building a proof-of-concept model to resist normalization of sexist speech online.
Engage with IT for Change's previous research on gender-based cyberviolence here.
Research Outputs
The Judiciary's Tryst with Online Gender-Based Violence: An Empirical Analysis of Indian Cases and Prevalent Judicial Attitudes
Malavika Rajkumar and Shreeja Sen, IT for Change
October 2023: Judicial attitudes in cases of online gender-based violence (OGBV) are an important measure of access to justice for victims/survivors; an indicator of whether those who brave the labyrinth of legal procedures feel respected and heard. The core of addressing OGBV must rest on principles of substantive equality—recognizing that individuals and groups may have special needs that must be addressed to achieve equality in outcomes rather than merely formal equality, which assumes all people and groups should be treated the same way. Dignity and privacy, which include aspects of personal autonomy, bodily integrity, and informational privacy, are the other cornerstones. These three attributes offer a rights-based approach to adjudicating OBGV cases. These principles were the bedrock on which this study was undertaken.
The study, conducted in 2021-2022, used legal provisions in the Indian Penal Code, 1860 (IPC), and the Information Technology Act, 2000 (IT Act), to identify cases of OGBV adjudicated in Indian courts across all levels—subordinate courts as well as High Courts and the Supreme Court. The cases, selected through purposive sampling, offer several key insights. The findings reveal how courts view cases of OGBV, flagging emerging concerns that need attention.
Know more about the study here.
Feminist Perspectives on Social Media Governance
February 2023: IT for Change, in collaboration with InternetLab, co-organized a roundtable in April 2022 to catalyze a productive debate revolving around the central question: What new imaginaries of social media governance will be adequate to eradicate the unfreedoms arising from misogyny in online communications agora?
As part of the roundtable, we brought together 20 academics, lawyers, digital rights activists, and scholar-practitioners committed to feminist politics, to collectively reflect on, discuss, and debate these questions, in order to weave a rich tapestry of perspectives on future directions for social media governance.
This curated compendium of essay submissions is from the participants of the roundtable and offers glimpses of the enriching discussions that were held.
Profitable Provocations: A Twitter-based Study of Abuse and Misogynistic Trolling Directed at Indian Women in Public-political Life
Anita Gurumurthy and Amshuman Dasarathy, IT for Change
August 2022: IT for Change undertook a research study on hateful and abusive speech on Twitter directed at 20 Indian women in public-political life.
The broadest finding from this research is that all the women who were a part of the sample received some amount of abuse on the platform. None of the women were entirely spared. The study also found that the abusive speech received by women in public-political life rarely had anything to do with their work or their politics. It invariably took the form of gendered attacks on their bodies or character. The study concludes with a few recommendations for legal-institutional responses targeted at digital platforms.
The Internet-Enabled Assault on Women’s Democratic Rights and Freedoms
Arti Raghavan
December 2021: In this paper, Arti Raghavan writes about the problem of online gender-based violence in its various forms, and the need to develop legal responses that are commensurate with the scale and unique nature of the problem. She draws attention to the sui generis nature of online (as opposed to offline) hate which is characterised by the speed, volume and frequency of hatfeul messages. She argues that these new forms of misogynistic speech have implications beyond its chilling effect on women’s freedom of speech and expression, including the manner in which it profoundly impairs women’s exercise of citizenship rights and their democratic participation.
She argues that there is an absence of a constitutional vocabulary for gendered hate speech to appreciate how such speech reinforces structures of oppression and discrimination on the lines of gender. Central to her argument is the need to recognize the complicity of social media platforms in enabling and profiting from the viral spread of such hateful messages. As a way forward, she proposes rejecting the victim-perpetrator binary of the criminal justice system, and makes a case for focusing regulatory efforts on de-platforming harmful content, and stemming its virality and circulation.
Submission to the Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression for the UNGA Report on Gender Justice
Read it in English here | Read it in Portuguese here
June, 2021: IT for Change and InternetLab jointly responded to the call for inputs into the General Assembly Report on Gender Justice from the Office of the Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression. Building on the findings from our IDRC-supported research collaboration Recognize, Resist, Remedy that interrogates gender-based hate speech online in India and Brazil, we have articulated a feminist critique of the mainstream global consensus on determining the boundaries of the right to free expression.
Our submission argues that the rights of free expression and equality must be interpreted as mutually reinforcing values, and not in conflict with each other. The freedom of one ought not to result in the unfreedom of the many. We put forth the claim that the prevailing legal position on the right to freedom of expression has not been adequate to contend with the misuse and abuse of online freedoms in the digital public sphere, and this has resulted in a chilling effect on women’s first-order right to public participation. We also argue the need for new normative and legal benchmarks for gender-based hate speech that are attentive to the unique challenges posed by viral hate in the digital paradigm, grounded in the feminist principles of dignity, autonomy, and equality.
Rethinking Legal-Institutional Approaches to Sexist Hate Speech in India
Read the essay series here
February, 2021: A systematic study of the problem of sexist hate speech, examining not just the culture it manifests in, but its legal-institutional-technostructural underpinnings, has not been done in the Indian context. This project, undertaken in association with EdelGive Foundation and IDRC, Canada, is an exploration of sexist hate speech that aims to proactively and collaboratively shape, through a feminist framework, the normative trajectory of the online public sphere. This project brings together scholars and practitioners to unpack ‘sexist hate speech online’, with a view to developing:
1. A normative framework for the law to tackle online misogyny
2. A roadmap for the enforcement of such norms on social media platforms, and
3. A strategy to influence the ongoing process for amendment of laws.
Cyberviolence Against Women – A Roadmap for Legal Reform: Inputs to the Law Review Consultation Convened by the National Commission for Women
Read our submission here
December, 2020: We produced a feminist analysis of the problems in the law that occludes accountability for victims of gender-based violence, as well as recommendations for legal-institutional reform towards freedom for women from cyberviolence, as inputs to the ongoing law review consultation on cyber crimes against women, convened by the National Commission for Women in December 2020. Sexism, misogyny and gender-based violence on social media is trivialized and dismissed as a normal part of the online experience. Law enforcement agencies and platform intermediaries have failed at evolving effective and timely responses, hampered as they are by pre-digital legal-institutional frameworks whose conceptual frames fall short of grasping the new taxonomies of violence in digital sociality. Against this backdrop, the ongoing law review consultation is a timely and laudable initiative especially as it coincides with two very important legislative reform processes – the complete overhaul of the IT Act (2000) proposed by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the reform of substantive and procedural aspects of criminal law spearheaded by the Ministry of Home Affairs.
Participatory Action Research on Gender-Based Hate Speech Online with a Karnataka-Based Youth Group
Read the research report here
September-December, 2020: A Participatory Action Research (PAR) project with a youth group in Karnataka, India was facilitated by IT for Change and Samvada, an organization that empowers young people to create social change. This project aimed to aimed to co-evolve a proof-of-concept of a viable intervention model for young people that can promote a new online culture of zero tolerance for sexist speech. The model sought to build awareness among the cohort about misogyny, and develop and implement strategies to counter it. The participants engaged in training sessions and discussions, administered a survey on perceptions of online sexist hate, and launched a unique, Kannada-language digital media campaign against sexist hate speech. Through the PAR, the participants identified the need for systemic change, discovered their own political voice, and laid claim to the digital publics.
Submission on the Draft Amendment to Intermediary Guidelines Rules 2018
Read it here
January, 2020: We shared specific recommendations on the content moderation aspects of platform governance with the relevant ministry that addressed the overlaps between gender-based hate speech and other forms of online violence against women. Our submission to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology towards the ongoing revision of internet intermediary liability guidelines under India’s Information Technology Act, 2000, brought in considerations of tackling online sexism and misogyny.
Submission to the UN Special Rapporteur's Report, 'Privacy: A Gender Perspective'
Read it here
October, 2019: Our recommendations on privacy and gender to the UN Special Rapporteur on Privacy highlighted, among other issues, the social and community surveillance of women that has a chilling effect on their participation in online publics. Our submission also outlined the challenges to regulation posed by the techno-social underpinnings of misogyny online.
Media Pieces
‘Mind the Gap’: Sexuality Education in the Digital Era in China (Bot Populi)
Read it here
June, 2022: With an upswing in internet usage in China, digital platforms have become the primary source for youth in the country to obtain information about sexuality. While the information and values conveyed through these platforms highly influence the sexual norms and conduct of the youth, they are prone to hosting non-scientific information, gender-based violence, bias, discrimination, stereotypes, etc. Amid this reality, educators have started proactively using the internet and social media to promote Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE). In this context, this essay analyzes the challenges around the changing sexual behaviors of youth and sexuality education programs in the digital era in China. This is the twelfth piece from a special issue on Bot Populi on Feminist Re-imagining of Platform Planet.
A Feminist Lead Towards an Alternative Digital Future for Latin America (Bot Populi)
Read it here
April. 2022: Public sector initiatives implemented by various states and private companies in Latin America have been increasingly collecting large swathes data that informs critical public policy decisions. State and private actors- both subsidiaries of the Big Tech as well as the local startups have been using intrusive and generalizing data collection techniques that borrow directly from the Silicon Valley model. The essay highlights how these techniques intrude upon the privacy and autonomy of individuals, especially those belonging to traditionally marginalized groups, including women and gender-diverse populations. Citing examples from grassroots feminist movements in Latin America, the essay explores how feminist perspectives can help question technology and put it at the service of a paradigmatic change that furthers equality and social justice.This is the eleventh piece from a special issue on Bot Populi on Feminist Re-imagining of Platform Planet.
Transforming Digital Platforms for the People and Planet (Bot Populi)
Read it here
The Nth Rooms and the Ungovernable Digital Bodies (Bot Populi)
Read it here
April, 2022: Using the public outrage and legal prosecution of the perpetrators in the infamous nth room incident, where non-consensual intimate imagery extorted from women was traded across multiple social media platforms in a complex, subscription-based network as a starting point, the author explores the many layers of the misogyny-guided digital culture and the pitfalls of regulation, persecution, and control of online-sexual violence in South Korea. This piece situates the debates on gender in the cyber-future in the context of South Korean social codes and the intricacies of its legal system to call for a feminist future of the internet that is beyond protectionist and reductionist reactions that have emerged as solutions to cyber-violence today. This is the ninth piece from a special issue on Bot Populi on Feminist Re-imagining of Platform Planet.
Resisting Patriarchal Logics of Digital ID Systems (Bot Populi)
Read it here
April, 2022: When the Taliban captured Kabul in 2021, they took control of various digital identity systems. While the possibility of misuse of digital ID systems in Afghanistan puts activists, journalists, ethnic minorities, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and women at risk, this essay argues that the safety of the majority of Afghan men is under threat too. Both, the centralized nature of the platformized state and the international roots of Afghanistan's biometric databases, requires an intersectional approach to grasp the multi-layered and often non-linear nature of oppression flattened by digital ID systems. The essay argues that a vision of feminist digital justice that properly delineates collective harm — of a digital ID system on a collective people — can offer us a fuller view of what justice means for all those affected in the context of the platformized state. This is the eighth piece from a special issue on Bot Populi on Feminist Re-imagining of Platform Planet.
Artificial Intelligence and the Feminist Decolonial Imagination (Bot Populi)
Read it here
March, 2022: Many economies in the Global North and Big Tech firms use artificial intelligence (AI) as a geopolitical tool, which results in the concentration of wealth, knowledge, and control. Such a power concentration generates global asymmetries that contribute to the reproduction of oppressive systems such as capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. In the backdrop of this reality, this essay underscores the need to advance the feminist and decolonial imagination to develop AI technologies under ethical frameworks that consider the harms associated with the AI lifecycle. Furthermore, through examples of unique, community-led projects, this essay highlights how alternative AI technology can be developed to suit the best interests of local communities and empower them. This is the seventh piece from a special issue on Bot Populi on Feminist Re-imagining of Platform Planet.
Feminist Responses to Technology-Facilitated Violence (Bot Populi)
Read it here
February, 2022: Technology-facilitated violence (TFV) is any form of violence that uses technology to cause harms. It includes behaviors such as harassment, image-based sexual abuse, hate speech, sexual extortion, defamation, impersonation, doxing, and/or stalking a person in digital spaces including social media websites or through text messages. Like physical violence and abuse, members of equality seeking groups are often targeted with TFV because of underlying systemic discrimination that makes them vulnerable to violence. This piece explores the role of social media platforms and governments in developing better regulatory responses to technology-facilitated violence from a feminist lens. This is the sixth piece from a special issue on Bot Populi on Feminist Re-imagining of Platform Planet.
A Platformed Response to Hate Speech Against Women (Bot Populi)
Read it here
January, 2022: The ever-increasing cases of sex-based vilification on digital and online platforms have subordinated and silenced women online. Despite this, sex-based vilification remains largely unregulated by law. Furthermore, it has also not received much scholarly or policy attention. Women, therefore, often rely on digital platforms to offer appropriate responses to sex-based vilification online. However, their existing content moderation policies and practices are often ill-equipped to appropriately respond to this issue. In this context, taking Facebook's Hate Speech Community Standard as an example, this article argues that digital platforms need to engage with the complexity and nuance of sex-based vilification and its functions to appropriately respond to it and mitigate its harms. This is the fifth piece from a special issue on Bot Populi on Feminist Re-imagining of Platform Planet.
Protecting Dissent (Bot Populi)
Read it here
December, 2021: This piece explores how activists safely navigate the the online publics, without falling for the ideals of protection and security that can inadvertently bolster the power of states and corporations. The artical explores the discourse around cyber-security, which considers people to be the weakest link in creating safe online publics. She juxtaposes this discourse with what she calls a 'cryptographic hustle'. It observes that most online activist communities engage in a cartographic hustle to build coalitions around progressive causes on existing social media platforms while navigating regimes of state surveillance and corporate incentive structures. The article emphasizes that the cryptographic hustle is a testament to how communities work within and around a given system and its constraints to reach toward new modes of democratic action. This is the fourth piece from a special issue on Bot Populi on Feminist Re-imagining of Platform Planet.
Rethinking Privacy (Bot Populi)
Read it here
December, 2021: The birth of the internet promised to bring freedom, connect people globally, break barriers, and help achieve liberty, democracy, and equality. However, the digital ecosystem that we now inhabit is far from its original ideals. To address the indiscriminate extraction of personal data and its harms, this article argues for reconceptualizing privacy based on a feminist approach. It is not possible to reconceptualize privacy without challenging the data extractivism model, and the traditional liberal approach to individual privacy. Feminism can contribute to the shift away from the consent paradigm, which centers individual responsibility in securing individual privacy. In conclusion, a new conceptualization of privacy can build on the contextual and relational nature of privacy, and the infrastructures that our society can develop to handle and use data. This is the third piece from a special issue on Bot Populi on Feminist Re-imagining of Platform Planet.
“I feel empowered…but you have to have a thick skin” (Bot Populi)
Read it here
December, 2021: While women have benefited in many ways from platform-mediated work opportunities, particularly in the post-pandemic context, gender continues to insidiously influence their experience of platform work. This article, based on field narratives and research conducted in Kenya, explores the three key tensions in platform-mediated work for women, including the flip-side of the empowerment narrative, the myth of flexibility, and the penetration of social norms to online platforms. In conclusion, the authors apply the Gender at Work framework to the experiences of the women platform workers' from Kenya. It argues that to attain a larger feminist vision for the digital empowerment of women workers, we need supportive laws and policies along with social change outside the platform workplace. This is the second piece from a special issue on Bot Populi on Feminist Re-imagining of Platform Planet.
What Is Feminist Digital (In)justice? (Bot Populi)
Read it here
November, 2021: This moment of profound ecological, economic, political, and societal crises in the international order has also seen a rise in a global patriarchal backlash against women’s rights. The stark economic gender digital divides that persist across all levels of the data value chains, and the vitriolic online hate faced by women, which also inspires violence against women offline, reflect this reality. To address these ever increasing concerns of feminist digital injustice, this piece highlights the need to recognize the neoliberal logic underpinning the 'attention economy', and who profits from this injustice. This is the first piece from a special issue on Bot Populi on Feminist Re-imagining of Platform Planet.
A Feminist Social Media Future: How Do We Get There? (Bot Populi)
Read it here
March, 2021: To reclaim the emancipatory potential of social media for feminist transformation, we need urgent action along two fronts – a global normative benchmarking exercise that leads to new content moderation standards grounded in women's human rights, and techno-design alternatives for the creation of decolonized network infrastructures. This piece brings together insights from the Bot Populi podcast series Feminist Digital Futures, where feminist activists from across the Global South reflected on what it would take to reclaim the transformative potential of social media.
What’s So Private about Online Sexual Harassment? (Bot Populi)
Read it here
October, 2020: As women stake their claim in online publics, many have faced backlash in the form of online gender-based violence, much of which has been dismissed based on the patriarchal idea of women's presence in public spaces begetting 'temptation'. Additionally, the purely geo-spatial understanding of 'public space' in Indian laws addressing sexual harassment, and the general legal ambiguity about online publics, has lead to the accused in cases of online sexual harassment being acquitted. Bhavna Jha, in this article for Bot Populi, reflects on the Madras high Court's interpretation of “Public Place” in cases of sexual harassment in virtual spaces and emphasises the necessity of a feminist review of laws that are blind to the reality of spatial fluidity in a post-digital society.
Articulating a Feminist Response to Online Hate Speech: First Steps (Bot Populi)
Read it here
October, 2020: As online publics become integral parts of people's public and private lives, it is more important than ever to consider the ramifications of online hate speech against women and femininity. While the judiciary and social media platforms have tried to control online misogyny, their 'solutions' have been inadequate; sidestepping concerns of privacy, consent, and women’s dignity to focus on 'honor', free-speech, etc. In this article for Bot Populi, Anita Gurumurthy and Bhavna Jha emphasize the need to collaboratively develop a feminist articulation of how sexist hate can be curtailed across the techno-legal fictions of public, private, and digital spaces – making them safe and equally accessible.
Public Participation is a Woman’s First-Order Claim to Being Recognised as a Human Being, the Pandemic Can’t Be Allowed to Undermine That (Firstpost)
Read it here
June, 2020: The Covid-19 pandemic has shown just how deep the fault lines of gender inequality run and how women’s claim to the public is but a carefully negotiated allowance given to women. In this article, Anita Gurumurthy and Bhavna Jha argue that public (including online) participation is women's first-order claim to being recognized as human beings, and the pandemic cannot be allowed to undermine that.
Why the Debate on Political Ads on Social Media is a Distraction (Firstpost)
Read it here
November, 2019: This media piece by Anita Gurumurthy and Bhavna Jha is a contribution to the conversation on intermediary liability and the importance of responsibilisation of social media platforms. It argues that the law cannot become an instrument to legitimize private censorship, but must aim to slow the spread of intolerant attitudes, weaken extremist political forces, and guard against abuse by authoritarian populists, while providing judicial oversight and user right to appeal. It was originally published in Firstpost.
Events and Engagements
Roundtable on Feminist Perspectives on Social Media Governance
IT for Change and InternetLab organized a two-day closed roundtable on Feminist Perspectives on Social Media Governance on April 19-20, 2022. This roundtable was part of our Recognize-Resist-Remedy Project, funded by IDRC Canada, that explores how women's first-order right to participation can be reclaimed in the platformized publics of the Internet age.
For a brief synopsis of the overarching themes covered in the roundtable, read our syntheisis report of the event here.
Find the blurbs of the essays presented at the roundtable and copies of the draft essays here.
Sexism and the Online Publics
Watch it here
February, 2021: IT for Change, with support from EdelGive Foundation and International Development Research Centre, Canada (IDRC), brought together legal scholars, practitioners, platform intermediaries, feminist activists and journalists in a three-part webinar series, titled Sexism and the Online Publics, to unpack sexist hate speech online across February, in the lead up to International Women’s Day, 2021. The stellar lineup of speakers included Amber Sinha, Aparna Bhat, Arti Raghavan, Asha Kowtal, Mariana Valente, Mariya Salim, N.S. Nappinai, Shehla Rashid, Vaishali Bhagwat, Vishal Gogne, Vrinda Bhandari, and more. The series was open to the public and sought to create a much-needed space for an informed deliberation to address an issue vital to women’s fundamental rights in a democracy.
Safe Digital Spaces, a dialogue on countering cyberviolence (Open Forum at IGF 2020)
Watch it here
November, 2020: In the first wholly virtual avatar of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), IT for Change co-organized and participated in an Open Forum to feed into a multi-stakeholder consultative dialogue. Led by the Web Foundation and UN Women, this Open Forum sought to develop concrete solutions to address intersectional online gender-based violence across platforms from a technological and policy perspective. Participants in the Open Forum highlighted the need for tech companies and governments to learn from grassroots CSOs in order to build concrete solutions to online abuse, and therein emerged a call to build more localized, effective models of content moderation and reporting flows.
Judges' Training on A Feminist Perspective on the Right to Privacy
View the presentation here
July, 2020: IT for Change’s Anita Gurumurthy facilitated a training session on the Right to Privacy: A Feminist Perspective for newly recruited judges at the Delhi Judicial Academy. The session focused on the evolution of the doctrine of privacy and its implication on platform publics in a datafied economy. The need for carving out a right to privacy in the new public sphere was explained through the lens of gender-based cyberviolence, and the feminist principles of privacy in the new public sphere, autonomy, dignity and equality were emphasized. The session went on to discuss techno-policy considerations in interpreting the right to privacy through complex real-world applications such as facial recognition technologies, privacy enhancing technologies and encryption.
Panel on Intermediary Liability and User Rights
Read the event report here
January, 2020: IT for Change’s Bhavna Jha participated in a panel on intermediary liability organized by the Centre for Internet & Society. The panel examines sections 69 and 79 of the IT Act that permit the government to mandate intermediaries to remove/block content. The discussion focused on the procedural flaws of the law, issues of due process, and the lack of transparency in the legal process of content takedown.
Internet Detox: A Fail-Proof Mechanism to End Online Sexism (Panel at IGF 2019)
Watch it here
November, 2019: IT for Change, along with InternetLab, organized and participated in a panel on ‘Internet Detox: A Fail-Proof Mechanism to End Online Sexism’ at the Internet Governance Forum, Berlin in November 2019, which was one of the three propositions around gender to be accepted.
