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FEMINIST ACTIVISM AND
PLATFORM POLITICS
Verity Anne Trott
Feminist Activism and Platform Politics
Trott interrogates how feminist activists navigate complex technological

ecosystems to build awareness of misogyny, violence against women, and
oppressive experiences women face both online and offline while cultivating
transnational feminist networks and carving out spaces upon which to build
and elevate women’s voices.
This book is guided by a few key questions: how is feminist activism trans-
forming and being mutually shaped by a dynamic and volatile platform
ecosystem? How are activists attempting to negotiate this terrain? And, how
are (anti)feminist politics contested within the platform society? These ques-
tions are addressed through analysis of three key case studies: the interna-
tional feminist organisation Hollaback!; the #EndViolenceAgainstWomen
campaign; and the global #TakeDownJulienBlanc movement. Building
on the intersecting fields of feminist media studies, platform and internet
research, and political communication, this book addresses cultural and
social questions about how digital platforms shape the values of our com-
munities and how stakeholders negotiate and engage in civic practices.
This timely and important work interweaves activist discourses, women’s
voices and scholarly literature together to provide insight into the realities
of operating within a platform society. It will be of interest to students and
scholars of journalism, gender studies, media and communication studies,
culture studies, and sociology.
Verity Anne Trott is Lecturer in Digital Media Research in the School of

Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University. Her published research
explores digital feminist activism, networked masculinities, online com-
munities and digital cultures and has appeared in international journals
including New Media & Society, Information Communication & Society and
Feminist Media Studies.
“Verity Trott’s Feminist Activism and Platform Politics does a brilliant
job of describing and analysing individual actions and #hashtag activ-
ism but setting them in the context from which these actions emerge.
Read right to the end to discover why it’s #yesallwomen. Scholarly but
also beautifully written.”
Dr Jenna Price, Australian National University, Australia
“Feminist Activism and Platform Politics provides a timely and com-

pelling intervention into the complexities of digital spaces as sites of
gendered violence and feminist resistance. Verity Trott offers a thought-
ful and nuanced account of how platform architecture, misogyny and
resistance are deeply intertwined.”
Dr Bianca Fileborn, University of Melbourne, Australia
Feminist Activism and
Platform Politics
Verity Anne Trott

First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2023 Verity Anne Trott
The right of Verity Anne Trott to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Trott, Verity Anne, author.
Title: Feminist activism and platform politics / Verity Anne Trott.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022030601 (print) | LCCN 2022030602 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032357737 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032357744 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003328506 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Ecofeminism. | Women and the environment. |
Misogyny. | Women--Social networks. | Women--Political activity. |
Environmentalism. | Feminists. | Sex discrimination against women.
Classification: LCC HQ1194 .T76 2023 (print) | LCC HQ1194 (ebook) |
DDC 305.4201--dc23/eng/20220714
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022030601
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022030602
ISBN: 978-1-032-35773-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-35774-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-32850-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003328506
Typeset in Times New Roman

by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Contents
Prefacevii
Acknowledgementsxii
Introduction: Feminist platform politics 1

What are platforms? 1
Digital feminist activism 2
Intersectionality 4
Studying digital feminist activism 7
1 The blogosphere and feminist-owned platforms 15

The Hollaback! story 15
The blogosphere 19
Owned platforms 24
Feminist platform policies 29
2 Mapping tools, organisational platforms, and online communities 33

Mapping street harassment 33
Mobile technologies and organising platforms 41
HeartMob 46
3 Social media platforms and toxic-techno cultures 52

Geek origins of social media platforms 57
#EndViolenceAgainstWomen 61
Feminist digilantism on social media 64
4 Negotiating feminist values on social media platforms 73

Hashtags and algorithmic culture 75
Community guidelines and moderation 79
Division and closure: Digital feminisms and
intersectionality 87
vi Contents
5 Social action platforms and the manosphere 95
Pickup artists, masculinity, and the manosphere 96
#TakeDownJulienBlanc 98
Social action platforms 104
6 Web infrastructure and alt-tech 116

Event management platforms 118
Donation and revenue services 119
Email marketing, webhosting services, and domain
registrars 121
DDoS protection services 123
The rebirth of 8chan and the rise of the alt-tech Alliance 125
Conclusion 134
Index 143
Preface
On 19 August 2017, I woke up to dozens of emails from Academia.edu to

alert me that my academic profile had received a large number of views
overnight. This was surprising as I had very little content on my profile, and
I was only just wrapping up the second year of my PhD candidature. The
source of attention on my profile was a conference paper I had uploaded
some months earlier that explored themes relating to rape culture in season 1
of the joint Netflix-Marvel television series Jessica Jones. The conference
talk, which was later published as a chapter in a film studies book about
superheroes (Trott 2018), detailed how the show challenges common rape
myths through the construction of the villain Kilgrave (played by David
Tennant) and how male entitlement is manifest through the character’s
mind control superpowers.
The analytics provided by Academia.edu allowed me to see that much
of this sudden increase in traffic to my profile and conference paper was
being directed from a particular post on Reddit1. Reddit is a pseudonymous
bulletin board-style news aggregate platform in which communities form
as “subreddits” around particular topics and interests. Following the source
link from the Academia.edu analytics, I found a discussion thread on the
subreddit r/Television that shared a media article by the American gam-
ing website Polygon that has a partnership with Vox Media, an American
news and media site considered to be progressive or left-leaning. The media
article drew attention to and applauded a “powerful scene” in which Luke
Cage explains white privilege to the Iron Fist in the recent Netflix-Marvel
Defenders series that unites several superheroes including Jessica Jones.
Underneath the post on Reddit was a polarised exchange between two
users. A summary of the exchange is detailed below:
User A: Will Jessica Jones talk about the gender wage gap in Season 2?
Will Daredevil talk about gasp able bodied privilege? I swear, Polygon
drives me up the wall with these kinds of articles. “Powerful
scenes” … “oppressively misogynistic” but no proof is given.
User B: That would be pretty awesome! Jessica Jones season one was
about rape culture so I wouldn’t be surprised.
viii Preface
User A: They have rape festivals in Jessica Jones? Or the show glorified
rape?? That sounds fucked up!
User B: Don’t be obtuse. Anyways, here is a good paper written on it.”
My stomach plummeted as I saw the final part of User B’s comment was
hyperlinked and directed users straight to my conference paper. User B
appeared to think they were doing something good by sharing the paper to
educate other users in their Reddit community; however they were embroiled
in a “debate” with a user whose discourse was saturated with the troll-like,
anti-feminist, misogynistic, white supremacist, ironic dialogue distinctive
of the toxic techno cultures and alt-right communities described by numer-
ous digital culture researchers (Viveca Greene 2019; Asaf Nissenbaum and
Limor Shifman 2017, Jessica Ringrose and Emilie Lawrence 2018, Emma
Jane 2014 to name a few) and that characterised the infamous gendered
online harassment campaigns of Gamergate that began several years earlier.
User A enraged by my paper set up a strawman argument by asking, “Do
you think all or even most straight white privileged men only think of rap-
ing?” and described my paper as “shallow minded and prejudiced.” The
arguments here draw on what has become known as a “classic” rebuttal to
feminist activism that aims to derail attempts to address male violence and
deflect one’s complicity in a system and society that upholds male power and
enables rape culture – understood as the social and cultural norms that ena-
ble rape and sexual violence (e.g. victim-blaming and slut-shaming a woman
based on what they were wearing and framing them as “asking for it” is
an explicit example of the mechanisms of rape culture) (Buchwald, Fletcher
and Roth 2005)2. The exchange between the users rapidly deteriorates as
User B reveals themselves to be a straight white man and a feminist ally.
In response, User A’s language becomes more extreme and hate-fuelled,
declaring User B to be a “race traitor” determined to “create problems for
your white race”.
Closing my web browser, I hoped the post would not gain too much
traction as I did not want to become the target of an anti-feminist harass-
ment campaign. The views to my Academia.edu profile gradually slowed
over the next few days until, perhaps a month later, I received a number of
follow requests on the image-based social networking platform Instagram
and several odd messages in the “other” folder on Facebook messenger –
the digital space in which messages from strangers are directed. A few of
these Facebook messages were from fake profiles, or what were essentially
shells of profiles, with the blue and white silhouette of a masculine “neutral”
figure as the default profile picture, a generic name, and little other infor-
mation. Their messages to me declared, “You’ve been exposed!” and shared
a suspect-looking link. Assuming these messages were just spam, I ignored
them until I received a more modest message from a stranger beginning
with an apology, “Sorry this is a bit awkward, I’m not sure if you are aware
but someone is sharing your nudes on this site”, and they shared a link.
Preface ix
Still suspicious, I looked up a URL checking service and finding Google’s
Transparency Report ‘safe browsing’ tool ran the shared URL to check if
it was considered safe to open. Confirming its legitimacy, I clicked on the
link and found myself on a particular niche porn website with a photo of
a nude white blonde young woman posted next to several screenshots of
my Academia.edu profile, my partially visible LinkedIn profile and private
Instagram profile with large text saying “exposed slut”.
I sighed a breath of relief and laughed when I saw the nude photo was
not me but was alarmed at the screenshots of my social networking p rofiles
that were posted and the amount of follow requests and awkward mes-
sages I was receiving from strangers on other platforms. I quickly realised,
as previous research into the consequences of image-based sexual abuse has
found (Henry et al. 2020), the posting of false “revenge porn” – that is the
non-consensual posting of one’s sexual images, or in this case falsely claim-
ing a nude image to be of me and maliciously posting it along with my work
information which is also a form of “doxing” – can have the same effects as
posting a “real” nude photo. Briefly looking around the porn site I was able
to quickly find a report button, flag the post and select from a drop-down
menu the category of offense the post fell into – in this case, the “revenge
porn” category. The post was quickly suspended from the website.
This smooth process of reporting, however, ended up being an uncom-
mon experience. Unfortunately, there was a community of users on this
site who used the space to compile galleries of image-based abuse and
to dox women across the globe. The platform administrator of this par-
ticular niche porn site was adamantly against image-based abuse, which
is why they had designed an easily available and quickly responsive con-
tent moderation process. Yet, due to the lack of resources available to the
administrator, the reliance on the good faith of users to report c ontent
that breached community standards, and that the website was predom-
inantly a hobby, the platform owner struggled to address the scale of
image-based abuse and ended up shutting down their site, leaving a public
notice posted on the now defunct platform that expressed frustration and
disappointment that their site was weaponised and misused for malicious
purposes. However, the communities of users who engage in this prac-
tice of image-based abuse exist across a wide spectrum of platforms and
despite this particular platform shutting down, some users had offline cop-
ies of their revenge porn galleries which they periodically upload onto
other platforms contributing to the continual proliferation of these images
and making it practically impossible to remove image-based abuse from
the web.
Over the past few years, despite removing public photos of myself from
my work profiles, having my social networking profiles set to private, and
changing my username, I encounter waves of attention as the same image
is reuploaded onto various sites. The majority of these sites are either ded-
icated pornography platforms which have a social networking element to
x Preface
them or anonymous image-board platforms in which users gain cultural
capital in trading “exposed” images of women. Each of these sites also have
their own gendered politics at play that shape and influence their community
standards, content moderation policies, the communities that emerge on the
platform and the types of practices engaged on their sites. Only a few align
with feminist politics and actively take a stance against image-based abuse
such as the website I first encountered. Several more have policies that are
concerned with copyright material, which provides one avenue for attempt-
ing to get image-based abuse removed, yet many more support anti-feminist
misogynistic cultures and profit financially by only enabling content moder-
ation mechanisms such as reporting or flagging content for premium users
who have a paid account. Ultimately it is practically impossible to remove
these images, particularly on platforms with no report function and that are
hosted by web infrastructure and service providers that are based in and
operate within cultures and geolocations that are tricky to regulate and in
which Australian and other Western agencies have little power or authority
over. Yet, in saying that, I have had encounters with strangers who have
messaged me about the posts in these spaces and who have helped to remove
the images when premium account access was required. This indicates that
even within the communities that operate within these types of spaces, there
are “in-group” users who may be able to challenge and shift the misogynis-
tic culture that proliferates.
What this personal story begins to elucidate is the complex platform
ecology in which feminist and anti-feminist politics is played out and the
very real effects it has on the daily life of women and minority users like
myself. From Academia.edu to Reddit, mainstream social media platforms,
and various porn websites, there is an ecosystem of digital platforms and
web infrastructure that cultivates and enables misogynistic, anti-feminist
cultures to proliferate. Yet, at the same time, there are a range of stake-
holders, from platform administrators to bystander users, who are attempt-
ing to curb these toxic cultures through individual actions (e.g. reporting
posts) and larger efforts such as deactivating the platforms they own (as
with the case with the niche porn website) or developing tools to help equip
users against illegitimate content (e.g. Google’s Transparency tool). My
experience also underscores the challenges that have emerged in terms of
moderating content online due to the scale and persistence of digital arte-
facts, including whom this labour falls upon (e.g. individual users, victims
of online abuse, poorly resourced platform owners), and starts to make clear
how these regulatory mechanisms demonstrate very political decisions that
shape the values of our digital society.
Notes
1 https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/6uowj9/defenders_finds_a_
powerful_scene_in_luke_cage/
Preface xi
2 Emilie Buchwald, Pamela Fletcher and Martha Roth’s (2005, p. xi) in their
updated book on rape culture describe rape culture as a “complex set of
beliefs that encourage male sexual aggression and supports violence against
women”.
References
Buchwald, E, P Fletcher, and M Roth (2005) Preamble. In: Buchwald E, Fletcher P,
and Roth M (eds) Transforming a Rape Culture (revised edition). Minneapolis,
MN: Milkweed Editions, pp. X.
Greene, Viveca S. 2019. “Deplorable” satire: Alt-right memes, white genocide tweets,
and redpilling normies. Studies in American Humor 5(1): 31–69.
Henry, N., C. McGlynn, A. Flynn, K. Johnson, A. Powell, and A.J. Scott. 2020. Image-
Based Sexual Abuse: A Study on the Causes and Consequences of non-Consensual
Nude or Sexual Imagery. Abingdon: Routledge.
Jane, Emma A. 2014. “You’re a ugly, whorish, slut” understanding e-bile. Feminist
Media Studies 14(4): 531–546.
Nissenbaum, Asaf and Limor Shifman. 2017. Internet memes as contested cultural
capital: The case of 4chan’s/b/board. New Media & Society 19(4): 483–501.
Ringrose, Jessica and Emilie Lawrence. 2018. Remixing misandry, manspreading, and
dick pics: Networked feminist humour on tumblr. Feminist Media Studies 18(4):
686–704.
Trott, Verity. 2018. “Let’s Start With a Smile”: Rape Culture in Marvel’s Jessica Jones.
In Haslem, Macfarlane and Richardson (eds.) Superhero Bodies: Identity, Materiality,
Transformation. New York City: Routledge.
Acknowledgements
This book is dedicated to the feminist activists who have devoted their lives
in the pursuit of developing a more equitable future. I am deeply grateful
to those whom offered their time and voices and allowed me to tell some of
their stories within this book. These stories do not end here but I hope this
book can help capture and make visible the work done by some truly inspi-
rational people.
I would like to acknowledge and pay my respects to the people of the
Kulin Nations, on whose land I predominantly wrote this book. I wish to
pay my respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging.
I am grateful to my colleagues in the School of Media, Film and
Journalism (and beyond) at Monash University who have given me the sup-
port, encouragement and stability to write this book at a particularly stress-
ful and tumultuous time.
A simple acknowledgement isn’t enough to recognise the time and sup-
port my mum and partner have provided me over the past few years and
which made it possible for me to work on such a long project.
Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge my two cats Rupert and
Miffy for their diligent supervision as I wrote this book at home during
Melbourne’s extended lockdown.
Introduction
Feminist platform politics
This book is devoted to exploring how feminist values are negotiated and
co-produced on digital platforms. While this book began with a personal
experience, there have been a number of large-scale moments in recent years
that demonstrate why such a focus is essential. From the unprecedented
visibility of popular feminist protests such as #MeToo, #YesAllWomen and
the Women’s March, to the far too many misogynistic and racist atrocities
that have shocked the globe by perpetrators radicalised within anti-feminist
digital communities, each of these moments serve as poignant reminders of
the realities and material effects of the social, political and cultural values
developed and debated in digital spaces. As a result, we must interrogate
all facets of a digitally entangled global society to understand why and how
violence is enabled by the platforms and tools that were once heralded as
liberating and empowering and to recognise how collectively we all play a
role in negotiating social values within the platform society.
What are platforms?

The term “platform” is a contested concept that has been strategically
deployed by a range of technology and web companies as a way to carefully
position themselves within the broader technological and information land-
scape to a range of stakeholders. Microsoft researcher Tarleton Gillespie
(2010) offers an interrogation of the term “platform” and the politics sur-
rounding it to help us understand how the term emerged, the discursive
work it does for the companies that deploy it, and the social, political, cul-
tural, economic and regulatory consequences that emerge from its use.
Gillespie (2010) makes it clear that the term “platform” was not origi-
nally a scholarly concept but rather emerged from the industry as online
content providers sought ways to position themselves in relation to users,
clients, advertisers, and policymakers. Gillespie (2010, p. 374) points to a
range of financial, cultural and regulatory demands that have raised ques-
tions about the role of digital intermediaries such as Google, YouTube, and
Facebook especially in terms of their obligations in relation to user pri-
vacy and intellectual property and how, as a result, these companies have
DOI: 10.4324/9781003328506-1
2 Introduction: Feminist platform politics
been attempting to discursively frame their services and technologies. They
do this, as Gillespie (2010, p. 374) further argues, “to position themselves
both to pursue current and future profits, to strike a regulatory sweet spot
between legislative protections that benefit them and obligations that do
not, and to lay out a cultural imaginary within which their services make
sense”. The term “platform” is one primary discursive tool used by online
content providers that is harnessed to do this strategic work.
Much scholarly research has emerged around the term “platform”, inter-
rogating its dimensions, significance, effects, and assuming the term to refer
to online intermediaries and content providers. Notably, Jose Van Dijck,
Thomas Poell and Martijn de Waal develop the concept of platforms fur-
ther in their 2018 book The Platform Society in which they deconstruct the
characteristics of a society in which platforms have gradually infiltrated and
converged with existing institutions and practices to produce contemporary
social structures. They identify platforms, and the platform society more
broadly, as contested sites in which public values and common goods are
negotiated and conflicts of interest between an array of actors including
governments, businesses, entrepreneurs, nongovernmental organisations,
consumers, citizens and so forth are played out. Zooming in to examine a
single platform’s anatomy, Van Dijck et al. (2018) describe several elements
that shape a platform’s power and influence: data, algorithms and inter-
faces, ownership, business models, and user agreements. These elements are
useful for understanding how power is accumulated and the impact of plat-
formisation on feminist politics and activism.
This book further engages with the concept of platforms as a contested
site for civic engagement and focuses more specifically on the contestation
of feminist and anti-feminist values within the contemporary digital terrain.
I take as a launching point Gillespie, and Van Dijck, Poell and de Waal’s
works to explore contemporary feminist platform politics. I use Van Dijck
et al.’s (2018, p. 4) definition of online platforms as “programmable digital
architecture designed to organise interactions between users – not just end
users but also corporate entities and public bodies” and their understanding
of platform ecosystems as an “assemblage of networked platforms, governed
by a particular set of mechanisms that shapes everyday practices”. With this
understanding of platforms, this book is guided by the key questions: how
is feminist activism transforming and being mutually shaped by a dynamic
and volatile platform ecosystem and how are activists attempting to nego-
tiate this terrain? And, how are (anti)feminist politics contested within a
contemporary platform ecosystem?
Digital feminist activism

From Donna Haraway (1985) to Sadie Plant (1998) and Judy Wajcman
(2004), feminist theorists have long considered the promises and pitfalls of
emerging technology for empowering women. In the 1990s and early 2000s,
feminist technocultures emerged and thrived on the blogosphere. Online
blogging communities provided opportunities for women and girls to con-
nect and develop new understandings of community, activism, the politi-
cal sphere and feminism (Keller 2012). Many feminist scholars argued for
the recognition of the political value of online discursive engagement and
demonstrated how the interlinkages between bloggers and resources helped
develop political networks of discourse between feminist activists and the
public (Guntarik and Trott 2016; Shaw 2012).
Along with blogging, a strong online do-it-yourself (DIY) culture emerged
within contemporary feminist groups. This culture encompasses blogs,
forums, e-zines and other websites that “operate as spaces for expression
and dialogue” regarding social and political issues in an informal, often
personalised context (Harris 2008, p. 482). From the mid-2000s, women’s
use of digital technology and online media platforms reached new heights of
visibility as feminist activism punctured global discourses in part due to the
affordances provided by emerging digital and social media. Several, largely
Western, feminist actions received globalised attention, such as Hollaback!
and Slutwalk, and social media was key in the spread and visibility of this
activism (Fileborn & Loney-Howes, 2020).
However, this period of time has also given rise to the dominance of post-
feminism. Rosalind Gill (2007) and Angela McRobbie (2007) theorised a
postfeminist sensibility dedicated to the repudiation of feminism by elevat-
ing a neoliberal worshipping of women’s empowerment via popular slogans
such as Girl Boss. The individualism around women’s liberation, women’s
entrepreneurship, and the over-emphasis of choice within postfeminist cul-
ture positions feminism and the fight for gender equality as no longer needed.
Sarah Banet-Weiser in her 2018 book Empowered further critiques types
of commercialised popular feminism and how it operates within an econ-
omy of visibility. The heightened visibility feminism has received has also
rendered it vulnerable to organised and collective misogyny. The same
tools that have enabled women and girls to connect and gain visibility have
also been weaponised against them in large-scale harassment campaigns,
trolling and doxing. Further, there have been accounts of anti-feminist
cyber-ghettos which have been involved in spreading misinformation and
disinformation (Wardle 2017) on a massive scale (Herrero-Diz, Pérez-
Escolar, and Plaza Sánchez 2020), along with the sockpuppeting of women
(particularly women of colour) on social media (Trott 2020) and hoaxes that
have been liable for the vilification of feminism (Pal and Banerjee 2019).
These kinds of attacks from anti-feminist and alt-right groups are attempts
to delegitimise women’s voices and feminism more broadly.
All of this prior work provides a solid foundation for the research pre-
sented in this book and collectively demonstrates the depth of how feminist
politics is contested in new, emerging and established digital spaces over
time and the wider ramifications for the development of globalised feminist
values. This book continues Banet-Weiser’s (2018) approach to examining
feminist activism and feminist politics by also examining the role of anti-
feminist actions, including gendered harassment campaigns and misog-
ynistic techno cultures such as the “pickup artist” industry. Throughout
the chapters I explore different case studies of feminist activism but I also
consider the misogynistic campaigns and actions that some of the feminist
protests are responding to and the anti-feminist backlashes the activists
encounter in reaction to speaking out publicly.
Intersectionality
The analysis presented in this book is guided by the principles of intersec-
tionality as developed by a number of Black feminist scholars and which
provide a nuanced framework for understanding feminist platform politics.
There is a rich history of Black feminist work that has emphasised the sig-
nificance of approaching issues of power and inequality in terms of a com-
plex “matrix” to shed light on the multiplicity of discriminatory experiences
people face based on their social location and that cannot be explained by
a singular-axis.
For example, in 1851, civil rights activist Sojourner Truth delivered a
moving speech in which she famously asked “Ain’t I a woman?” at a
Women’s Rights convention that was dominated by white suffragists. In
this speech, Truth drew attention to the radically different experiences of
Black women who had “ploughed and planted and endured the ravages
of slavery” (Jones and Norwood 2016, p. 2024) yet were denied the right
to vote as well as the basic rights to citizenship. The experience of slav-
ery not only differed from white women’s experiences but also opposed the
narrative that (white) women were too fragile and delicate to exercise their
rights to citizenship; this narrative of white fragility was used to restrict
white women from civil society.
Further cementing this understanding of multiplicity, Patricia Hill
Collins (1990) frames these differences in experiences as a result of a com-
plex “matrix of domination” and rejects “additive approaches to oppres-
sion” (p. 554). Collins argues for an approach that positions gender, age,
sexual orientation, race, social class, and religion as interconnected systems
of oppression. Collins (1990, p. 555) further lays out how “additive mod-
els of oppression are firmly rooted in the either/or dichotomous thinking
of Eurocentric, masculinist thought”. Instead, as Collins contends, adopt-
ing an approach to framing oppression as interlocking systems provides a
model that enables and embraces a “both/and” conceptual stance to under-
stand how privilege and oppression operate. Collins (1990, p. 556) draws on
feminist academic-activist bell hooks’ conceptualisation of the “politic of
domination” in which oppression operates along interlocking axes of race,
class, and gender oppression.
At a similar time to Collins’ conceptualisation, legal theorist Kimberlé
Crenshaw (1989; 1991) developed the term “intersectionality” to solidify
the conceptual understanding of how systems of oppression intersect and
interact to produce unique experiences of discrimination for those who
are located at multiple margins (e.g. gender and race; woman and Black).
Crenshaw (1991, p. 1249) identifies how another dimension of disempow-
erment can be a result of the imposition of one subordinal factor and how
it interacts with a pre-existing vulnerability, resulting in unique intersec-
tional concerns not often addressed by social movement groups. She also
demonstrates how feminist and antiracist discourses not only fail to address
the issues that arise at the intersection of gender and race but can uninten-
tionally further reproduce the subordination of both. This notion of inter-
sectionality, informed and contextualised also by Collins’ (1990) matrix of
domination, provides a conceptual framework for analysing the examples
of feminist activism explored throughout this book. Weaved throughout the
analysis of feminist actions is a consideration of how the discourse, narra-
tives and values promoted by feminist campaigns at times recognise multi-
ple systems of oppression while also often contributing to a homogenising
of feminist politics.
As I am adopting this understanding of intersectionality, it is significant
to recognise how the term itself has become a buzzword within academic,
activist and popular cultural spaces in recent times and how it has been used
in a number of different ways. While I am employing “intersectionality” as
a conceptual framework to critique case studies (case studies which are pre-
dominantly examples of white Western feminism regardless of the identities
of activists involved in them), some of the feminist activists I spoke with
employed the term as a form of identity and even a form of feminism (“I
am an intersectional feminist” or “I advocate for intersectional feminism”).
Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist studies Jennifer Nash
(2017, p. 117) highlights significant feminist debates around the term inter-
sectionality in which she dubs “the intersectionality wars”. Nash (2017,
p. 118) argues that some of the existing critiques, such as Jasbir Puar’s
analysis of “intersectionality’s use as a ‘tool of diversity management’ and
‘mantra of liberal multiculturalism’ reveals how intersectionality has been
institutionalised in troubling ways, often made to operate as a kind of
‘racial alibi’ either where the invocation of intersectionality is performed
instead of actual intersectional labor or where intersectionality is called
on to do precisely the kind of diversity work it critiques”. In a similar vein,
feminist digital cultures researcher Akane Kanai (2020) provides insight
into how feminists negotiate a feminist identity often through a classi-
fication of “good” or “bad” feminism and organised under two poles of
“white” and “intersectional” feminisms. Kanai (2020, p. 25) critiques the
use of intersectionality as a form of feminist identity which “paradoxically
obscures the reinvigoration of practices of middle-class whiteness centred
on self-monitoring, self-actualisation and the disavowal of complicity”.
Throughout my time with the feminist communities reflected in this book,
there were repeated occurrences in which an intersectional identity was
invoked to provide both a “racial alibi” as Nash would describe and also
to distance oneself from ongoing complicity within white feminism and
white political structures, as Kanai describes. In the case studies laid out
in this book however, white feminism was not the only form of feminism
that emerged in relation to the complex matrix of domination and indeed
there were also several variations of “white” feminism including radical
white feminism.
While Kanai (2020) frames “intersectional” in opposition to “white” in
terms of how feminists self-describe their feminist identity, the activists I
interviewed often positioned their “intersectional” feminism in opposition
to trans-exclusionary radical feminism and anti-sex work forms of femi-
nism. There were also several fractures and clashes within the feminist com-
munities I engaged with around the notion of class in which “working class”
was a common identity that several activists prescribed for themselves.
Their working-class version of feminism was often framed in opposition
to university educated feminists who were perceived as having unrealistic
expectations around the gendered discourse working class feminists would
be familiar with or have access to. There were several complaints by activ-
ists who believed feminist activists should not need to “pay their dues” by
performing knowledge of feminist literature to engage and lead activist
campaigns and that their lived experience should be their qualification for
speaking out and claiming space in relation to feminist politics and within
feminist communities.
I do not seek to define contemporary digital feminisms within this book.
In saying that, I am drawn to feminist writer Sara Ahmed’s (2017, p. 3) poetic
description of a feminist movement in her book Living a Feminist Life:
Feminism is a movement in many senses. We are moved to become

feminists. Perhaps we are moved by something: a sense of justice,
that something is wrong…A feminist movement is a collective politi-
cal movement. Many feminisms means many movements. A collective
is what does not stand still but creates and is created by movement…
Feminism: the dynamism of making connections. And yet a movement
has to be built. To be part of a movement requires we find places to
gather, meeting places. A movement is also a shelter. We convene; we
have a convention. A movement comes into existence to transform what
is in existence. A movement needs to take place somewhere. A move-
ment is not just or only a movement; there is something that needs to be
kept still, given a place, if we are moved to transform what is.
Ahmed touches on several important elements to understanding feminism

that I further want to emphasise. The first is that there are many feminisms.
This is significant to keep in mind as we consider how feminist activists
negotiate multiple feminisms to come together for the specific actions and
campaigns explored in this book. The second that is echoed throughout
the above passage is that a movement needs a place, a “somewhere”. For
us, that somewhere is on digital platforms and embodied by feminist dig-
ital networks.
Studying digital feminist activism

The research presented in this book is deeply embedded within feminist
epistemologies informed by feminist standpoint theorists such as Patricia
Hill Collins (1997) and Sandra Harding (1991) who argue that knowledge
production is always situated, partial and fluid – all knowledge comes
from “somewhere”. Collins’ (1997) reading of standpoint theory recontex-
tualises and emphasises how knowledge is embedded within hierarchical
power relations and that individual experiences can offer as starting points
for interrogating shared, group-based experiences of oppression. Feminist
researchers have long argued over the value of methodological practices
that privilege and centre the lived experiences of women. By using wom-
en’s voices and lived experience as the starting point of knowledge produc-
tion, feminist epistemologies resist and challenge the epistemic injustices
that have silenced and discredited women’s voices as a source of knowledge.
In line with this understanding of knowledge production, I adopt a digital
ethnographic approach to investigate digital feminist activism within a con-
temporary, predominately Western, platform ecosystem. Through this pro-
cess I collect what American anthropologist Faye V. Harrison (2007, p. x)
describes as “experience-near stories and counter-stories” from my direct
engagement with feminist activists along with the stories they recount in my
interviews with them.
My digital ethnography is inspired and influenced by John Postill
and Sarah Pink’s (2012) conceptualisation of social media ethnography
stemming from their own research into activist practices in Barcelona.
I prefer to frame my practices as a “digital ethnography” because my
research is more expansively focusing on the negotiation of feminist poli-
tics within a platform ecosystem. This means I focus on the structure and
ecology of a range of digital platforms including web infrastructure and
support services in a way that subverts the primary site of focus that is
assumed from the terminology “social media ethnography”. Postill and
Pink (2012) make some insightful arguments about the nature of ethno-
graphic practices within a complex and messy technological ecosystem.
They argue that the online sphere is a “messy fieldwork environment
that crosses online and offline works and is connected and constituted
through the ethnographer’s narrative” (Postill and Pink 2012, p. 126). As
a result, they make a case for ethnographic practices that analyse “digital
socialities” rather than online communities (p. 127). They also recognise
the value in practicing “media-switching and media-mixing to create and
maintain social relationships with research participants across space and
time” (p. 129).
I actively immersed myself as a researcher and a feminist into feminist
communities over a four-year period from 2014 to 2018 traversing online
and offline contexts as well as public and private spaces. I attended sev-
eral physical feminist protests, marches and vigils with some specifically
related to the case studies presented in this book while others were tangen-
tially related but would fit under the broad banner of protesting violence
against women. I also went to and participated in community feminist
events including talks, festivals, and feminist “meet-cutes”. Throughout
this time, I joined a range of online feminist groups, including feminist
101 type spaces, solidarity networks, local feminist collectives; subscribed
to and followed feminist blogs, media outlets and social media accounts;
and steadily built online networks with feminists and activists through
Facebook friend connections and “follows” on other social media plat-
forms. This engagement with feminist communities over the years does not
just constitute the research I have conducted for this book, and previously
for my PhD, but is also indicative of the development of my own feminist
identity. I consider the feminist subject to be an ongoing project of learn-
ing about and unlearning the systems and hierarchies in which we oper-
ate within and can be complicit in upholding. In terms of my own social
location (the standpoint in which I am situated through my shared experi-
ences and identification with particular groups and how I am perceived by
society), I am a white feminist located within a Western context and this
has characterised the spaces and types of connections I have built within
feminist networks both in terms of locally (situated in Australia) but also
internationally (within UK and US contexts).
Throughout the book I examine three primary case studies: the inter-
national advocacy organisation known as Hollaback! that seeks to end
street harassment; a series of reactionary protests opposing the misogy-
nistic entrepreneurial “pickup artist culture” and which manifested under
the hashtag #TakeDownJulienBlanc; and a localised solidarity hashtag
campaign known as #EndViolenceAgainstWomen that opposed the online
harassment of women in the media. These case studies, and my analysis of
them, predominantly take place in Australia, the UK and the US, although
both Hollaback! and #TakeDownJulienBlanc activism spans globally with
actions occurring in Asia, South America, the Caribbean and further.
To privilege the lived experience of the activists and feminists involved
in each of the case studies, I conducted semi-structured, in-depth inter-
views with 24 activists in which they recounted their experiences organis-
ing and participating in the particular protests I was investigating but also
reflected on their broader experiences of activism within feminist communi-
ties and in relation to other causes and movements, such as climate change,
LGBTQIA+ rights, Black Lives Matter, detainment of asylum seekers, and
police violence against indigenous Australian peoples. I relied on a snowball
method of recruiting activists to interview. Initially I made posts on femi-
nist online groups and spaces as a call out for participants, inviting anyone
involved with the case studies to reach out, as well as directly contacting key
activists who had made public comments to the media about their involve-
ment with the protests. From these posts, several activists reached out to me
for an interview and then directed me to other activists who were involved
in the actions. This was a valuable process as it allowed me to build trust
with feminists and activists within the community and also begin piecing
together the messy network of feminists involved in the actions – some of
whom had fragmented online profiles and presences.
In the interviews, each of the activists reflected on their own identity,
including what it meant to them to identify as a “feminist” and an “activ-
ist”. Together with the activists, we scrolled through their social media and
reflected on key moments of the protests, their engagement and any other
digital encounters and content that prompted reflections on their experi-
ence. At times, they shared with me particular protest paraphernalia that
helped illustrate their narratives and experiences. Not all of the activists
are public in their activism or their involvement with these specific protests.
There are also a number of risks involved, as explored throughout this book,
with being outspoken and identifying as a feminist in public spaces, such as
the online harassment and abuse women receive as a result of anti-feminist
backlashes. With these concerns in mind, I have given the majority of my
interviewees’ pseudonyms, but I have retained the names of those who are
public figures in their work and who took on roles as the face of the protests
by dealing publicly with the media.
The case studies and stories explored within this book were selected
because they demonstrate how feminist activists are actively negotiating and
shaping the values and culture of the platform society and provide useful
examples to interrogate specific aspects of platform ecosystems. By focus-
ing on feminist activism, we can see how a range of stakeholders (includ-
ing digital and platform companies, governments, users, advertisers and
others) come together to negotiate and contest competing and sometimes
conflicting social and political values within the digital sphere and that have
extensive effects in the material world. Feminism (broadly speaking) offers
a particularly insightful focal point at a time in which it has gained monu-
mental visibility due to the affordances and especially scalability that digital
platforms have provided campaigns such as #MeToo, #YesAllWomen and
the international Women’s March, and demonstrates how social and politi-
cal conflict can play out across platform ecosystems.
Each of the following chapters explores different dimensions of plat-
forms with a specific focus on the Western ecosystem and considers how
clashes between feminist and anti-feminist activism (often enacted by men’s
rights activists and pickup artists amongst other actors) play out at various
technological levels. Chapter 1 discusses the role of the blogosphere in the
development of digital feminist communities in an exploration of the anti-
street harassment advocacy organisation Hollaback! and considers the
value of feminist owned and run digital platforms. Throughout this chapter,
I draw on Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s (2020) principles of
Data Feminism along with a close analysis of the Hollaback! website’s plat-
form documentation to help conceptualise what feminist platform policies,
terms of service and data privacy policies might look like. I interview activ-
ists that lead different Hollaback! chapters in the US, Australia and the
UK at various stages of their involvement to understand their experiences
with the technological infrastructure of a transnational and sustained form
of feminist activism. Chapter 2 continues the Hollaback! story and inter-
rogates the role of mobile technologies, mobile applications and the role
of “support” platforms and technology. I explore here the limitations and
challenges of developing entirely feminist owned platforms when there are
key “choke” points within the Western platform ecosystem and a concen-
tration of platform power that is difficult to circumvent. For example, due
to limited technological and financial resources, Hollaback!’s countermap-
ping application relies on Google’s mapping technology; rendering it sub-
ject to Google’s data practices and politics. Further, Hollaback!’s mobile
application was reliant on approval from the Apple iOS store and Google’s
Play Store, once again rendering them vulnerable to the politics of these
digital giants. Chapter 2 also discusses Hollaback!’s shift to addressing not
just street harassment but also online harassment through the development
of the initiative HeartMob.
Chapter 3 discusses the “geek” origins of mainstream social media plat-
forms and considers how these origins relate to the emergence of mascu-
line toxic-techno cultures that have enabled repeated misogynistic abuse
against women in online spaces such as through the phenomena of revenge
porn and online harassment. The Australian solidarity hashtag campaign
#EndViolenceAgainstWomen is used as a way of exploring how feminists
are attempting to challenge the misogynistic culture enabled through the
design and affordances of corporate social media and how feminist values
clash with the principles of free speech at the heart of the Californian ide-
ology embedded within Silicon Valley platforms. Chapter 4 delves further
into the culture of social media platforms by interrogating the algorithmic
and automated systems that both feminist and anti-feminist activists are
able to harness for their own purposes; the first being to raise awareness
and draw attention to the abuse women encounter online while the latter to
silence feminist voices in the mainstream digital sphere. I also analyse the
community standards and guidelines documentation of dominant, main-
stream social media platforms and consider how these are constantly evolv-
ing entities that are to an extent malleable to social, political, regulatory
and economic pressures. I locate these documents as key sites that reflect
the ongoing negotiation of public values and the social good in the platform
society amongst commercial and corporate interests. This chapter con-
cludes by illustrating how closed feminist spaces on social media platforms
can also be sites of contention in which feminist values are negotiated and
multiple forms of feminism may collide.
Chapter 5 explores further masculine cultures online with a focus on the
Manosphere (a network of loosely connected men’s groups that promote
particular visions of masculinity and oppose feminism) and how femi-
nist activists are challenging the sexist and racist practices taught by self-
proclaimed “pickup artists” for financial gain. The chapter breaks down
the messy web of protests and actions that occurred under the hashtag
#TakeDownJulienBlanc and brings into the spotlight the politics of social
action platforms, such as Change.org, and their role in defining, shaping
and negotiating the meaning of popular protests through the development
of e-petitions. Chapter 6 continues to investigate the pickup artist industry
and interrogates the platform ecology that has enabled such a misogynis-
tic industry to thrive with a specific focus on web infrastructure, that is,
the technology and services that provide support to other platforms like
forums and websites. In this chapter, I explore the role of event manage-
ment platforms, donation and revenue services, email marketing services,
domain registrars and webhosting services, and distributed denial-of-
service (DDoS) protection services as important stakeholders in negotiat-
ing (anti)feminist values in contemporary society. I finish the discussion by
considering the rise of what has become known as the “Alt-Tech Alliance”
in which we see the development of radical and fringe platforms and web
infrastructure emerge in reaction to the social values negotiated and
enforced through platform moderation mechanisms within the mainstream
digital sphere. In the concluding chapter of the book, I consider one other
site in which feminist values are negotiated: within the internal workplaces
of platform companies.
Collectively, the work presented here builds on the intersecting fields of
feminist media studies, platform and internet research, and more margin-
ally, the field of political communication to address what are really cultural
and social questions regarding how digital platforms shape the values of
our communities and how stakeholders including feminist activists, anti-
feminists, governments, companies, amongst others negotiate and engage in
civic practices. Significantly, the book re-establishes a link between feminist
activists and the academy, interweaving activist discourses, women’s voices
and scholarly literature together to provide insight into the realities of liv-
ing and operating within a platform society and recognising the significant
labour and costs undertaken and endured by feminist activists and women
as they fight for a more equitable world.
The research in this book demonstrates how feminist activists navigate
complex technological ecosystems to build awareness of misogyny, vio-
lence against women, and oppressive experiences women face both online
and offline while cultivating transnational feminist networks and carving
out spaces upon which to build and elevate women’s voices. While encoun-
tering persistent misogyny including large-scale anti-feminist harassment
campaigns, the activists build safe havens in private and closed digital
spaces both on mainstream platforms like Facebook and on feminist owned
and operated platforms, such as Hollaback!’s HeartMob. These closed
spaces provide sanctuaries of sorts in which feminists are able to provide
solidarity and build a supportive network that enables them to (re)engage
in the mainstream digital public sphere with backup to help weather the
storm of gendered abuse they are subjected to when seen to be taking up
space and advocating for women’s issues. The examples explored through-
out the book also demonstrate that the changes platforms have made as a
result of feminist protests and large-scale public pressure have not been the
result of a clear linear process. While some of the experiences and actions
the activists recall did not have a clear definitive outcome or result (e.g.
no legislative change), it is important to consider each of these actions
as part of a much wider collective and movement. With this perspective
in mind, each of these protests, regardless of their scale, contribute to
(re)energising feminist affective publics and, as communications researcher
Zizi Papacharissi (2015, p. 68) suggests, these actions can generate power
through repetition and cumulative intensity, becoming “deadening, pow-
erful, and disruptive”.
This book demonstrates the complexity of negotiating feminist politics
internally within feminist communities and the compromises feminists
make when faced with a lack of resources, including financial support, to
build alternative technological infrastructure (such as mapping technol-
ogy). Overall, one of the key contributions this book provides the fields
of feminist media studies, digital activism, and platform studies is going
well beyond the classic dichotomous arguments put forward by cyberfem-
inist and techno-dystopian critiques and recognising the different ways
in which digital platforms and digital technology more broadly work to
both empower and oppress women and marginalised people and often
extend pre-existing capitalist and heteropatriarchal social structures into
the digital sphere. In this way, new logics of feminist activism are not nec-
essarily being created in digital environments; rather digital technology
is enabling and opening up the potential to draw on multiple logics of
activism and feminism as a range of stakeholders collide as they attempt
to negotiate social values across increasingly complex and fragmented
platform ecosystems.
As with any book, there are so many areas and perspectives that I have
not been able to address or include, particularly in terms of the platform
ecologies that exist and operate in contexts beyond the West and beyond
an infrastructure largely characterised by Californian-based technology.
This is also a rapidly evolving field with the concentrated power of platform
giants being challenged at a number of levels with, for example, Facebook
again (at the time of writing) in the US congressional spotlight after whistle-
blower Frances Haugen’s testimony detailing the harms caused by the algo-
rithmic systems of social media platforms in October 2021 (Slotnik 2021).
The platform documentation I examine in this book should also be con-
sidered “live” products as they slowly but continually evolve in response
to mounting public pressure and current events. As such, the results and
analysis presented here mark a moment in time in the negotiation of data
privacy policies and “community standards” and can offer a useful source
to refer back to as we reflect on the development of platform governance. I
hope these gaps and limitations can be seen as opportunities by others to
add their own perspectives and to further engage in a conversation about
how we negotiate value and politics in transnational digital spaces.
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1 The blogosphere and
feminist-owned platforms
The Hollaback! story

In 2005, a woman named Thao Nguyen used her mobile phone to photo-
graph a man masturbating in front of her on the New York City subway. The
police did nothing when she brought the photo to them, so she posted the
picture online, in several forums, and the photo went viral. From that point,
it caught the attention of mainstream media outlets, and The New York Post
published it as their front-page story, which led to the man’s arrest. In this
way, Nguyen used digital technology as a mode of resistance against sexual
harassment in public spaces.
For Nguyen, her mobile phone empowered her to flip the “male gaze”,
and recast the experience of street harassment from her perspective, albeit
mediated through mobile technology. The “male gaze” is a concept devel-
oped within feminist film theory by scholar and filmmaker Laura Mulvey
in a 1975 essay about Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Mulvey (1994)
developed this idea to describe the way visual media often sexualises and
depicts women to appeal to a heterosexual masculine gaze in a way that
reduces a woman’s agency (including her own thoughts, feelings, desires,
and motivations), and positions her as an object of heterosexual male desire.
Men, or at least heterosexual men, in this scenario are empowered as their
desire is centralised and prioritised while women are framed as the “specta-
cle” to be looked at for man’s enjoyment.
While the idea of the male gaze developed within the context of visual
media such as cinema, it has much broader relevance for understanding
the sexual politics of the gaze in other spaces. In fact, many scholars have
documented the inextricable link between the male gaze and street har-
assment, demonstrating how men maintain power and privilege in public
spaces through the normalisation of the male gaze and the sexualisation
of women in public. An entire field of literature has also emerged over the
last thirty years that details the various harms street harassment inflicts on
women and non-binary people and attempts to name this harm. As Deirdre
Davis makes clear, in her work into “The Harm That Has No Name” in
1994, sexual objectification, cultural domination, and the existence of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003328506-2
16 The blogosphere and feminist-owned platforms
gendered and racial stereotypes make up the pre-existing context that ena-
bles street harassment.1
When Thao Nguyen, who was then 22 and alone on the subway, pulled
out her mobile phone and aimed the camera at the much older white man
(then 43), who was also a powerful, well-known restaurant owner in New
York City, she disrupted the male gaze by framing the man as the object and
herself as the voyeur. In this way, her mobile phone was empowering as it
provided a mode for resistance, a way to challenge the harasser, and to redi-
rect attention to the behaviour of the perpetrator as opposed to the woman
victim who has traditionally faced heightened visibility and blame as she
is cast in the role of temptress. The camera phone also took on the role of
witness, documenting the harassment to corroborate her story.
On the one hand, while mobile technology can be considered empower-
ing in Nguyen’s case, it also ties into problematic notions of believability.
The mere fact that Nguyen needed photographic evidence to corroborate
her story, lends itself evidence to the ongoing epistemic injustice of silenc-
ing and discrediting women’s voices as a source of knowledge and women’s
believability. That the technology (the camera phone) was perceived as a
more “objective” source in detailing and proving the harassment also plays
into the positivist assumptions that underpin the use of digital technology
as well as the trust and reliability of digital data that emerges from such
technological use. These two points about believability and the role of tech-
nology and digital data to provide credibility to women’s experiences and
in digital feminist activism more broadly will be further explored later in
this chapter.
Despite the more “objective” photographic evidence of the harassment,
the police still failed to address the harassment Nguyen had faced on the
subway. Needing a space to reflect on what she had experienced, Nguyen
posted a written account along with the photograph onto the image-sharing
website Flickr, which had launched and become a popular site for ama-
teur photographers a year earlier in 2004, also correlating with the rise of
newly available mobile phone cameras. At the time, Flickr was one of the
most popular image-sharing and community-based platforms, appealing to
professional and amateur photographers, designers and bloggers due to its
capacity to operate as an image-repository and the ability to embed photo-
graphs from Flickr onto other platforms including blogs. Flickr was her-
alded as one of the early successes of Web 2.0 (Prieur et al. 2008), drawing on
affordances that enabled the sharing and discoverability of user-generated
content, along with the ability to establish a networked community of users
around the world. This was, of course, shortly before the rise of popular
media-sharing and social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram,
Twitter and even YouTube. Flickr offered Nguyen a place to share her expe-
rience with the ability to upload a photograph from her mobile phone and
to accompany this with written text further contextualising her experience,
enabling her to take control and ownership of the narrative.
The blogosphere and feminist-owned platforms 17
Several contextual factors contributed to why Nguyen’s post went viral
on Flickr and across the blogsphere, catching the attention of mainstream
media outlets who later propelled the story into national and even inter-
national news. First, the technical features of Flickr allowed for posts
to be shared, commented on and discoverable. Second, the photograph
depicted a man masturbating in a non-pornographic environment (on a
subway and also on a photo-sharing rather than pornographic website),
which added to the shock and controversy, catching public attention.
Third, and definitely not least, the man was a reasonably well-known
successful businessman in New York City leading to his identification
and lending further interest to the particular “scandal”. This demon-
stration of public interest prompted the Daily News to publish the photo
and share the story on their front page with the headline “EXPOSED!”
(Butler 2015), triggering several other women to come forward and report
complaints about similar encounters with the same man. As a result, the
man was arrested and charged with public lewdness, which sparked civic
debate about street harassment.
Despite the ultimately successful outcome in Nguyen’s case, the exam-
ple raises several questions and problems that feminist activists continue
to grapple with as they navigate the politics of digital platforms and tech-
nology, as well as the moral and attention economies of online audiences.
Nguyen’s experience of street harassment received such a strong reaction
from a mainstream audience in part because of its sexual explicitness; how-
ever, what counts as street harassment and what types of actions are taken
seriously has been deeply contested with subtle acts often trivialised and
dismissed. Sociologist Laura Logan in her 2015 review of street harassment
research noted that street harassment most commonly refers to actions such
as catcalling, wolf-whistling, following someone, staring/leering, sexual
comments, unwanted touching as well as more explicit sexual acts such as
public masturbation, sexual assault and rape. Typically, street harassment
is perpetrated by unknown men in public or semi-public places, which is
why legal scholar Fiona Vera-Gray (2016) argues for a shift away from the
term “harassment” to instead framing these acts as men’s “intrusions”. This
shift would expand the scope of what “counts” to include more subtle and
context-dependent experiences.
Street harassment has also generally been conceptualised as a form of
sexual and gender-based violence, and even within this book, I refer to
anti-street harassment advocacy as a form of feminist activism. However,
there have been many intersectional contributions that demonstrate it is not
strictly a gendered experience and that people experience unique forms of
harassment based on their socio-structural location. Deidra Davis (1994,
p. 135) argues for the need to refocus on a person’s embodiment to under-
stand how street harassment, and oppression more broadly, is experienced
by those whose embodiments are assigned particular meanings. In doing
this, Davis demonstrates how African American women are located at sites
of multiple subordination (both racial and gendered) lending to unique sets
of experiences that have historically been excluded from feminist discourse
and theory. Beyond racial oppression, political scientist Hawley Fogg-Davis
(2006) draws attention to the experiences of those at intersecting structural
inequalities including racism, patriarchy, homophobia and spatial poverty
in her work into the street harassment experienced by Black lesbians. And
Hannah Mason-Bish and Irene Zempi (2019) highlight the further risk
of street harassment encountered by veiled Muslim women and religious
minorities. What these critical and intersectional contributions underline is
that what counts as street harassment and who is able to share their experi-
ences and be believed is shaped through relations of power.
While it is not within the scope of this chapter to further conceptual-
ise street harassment, what I do consider in this chapter and the following
chapter is the role of digital technology and online platforms in the poten-
tial to disrupt, resist, challenge and protest against street harassment. To
do this, I examine the anti-street harassment advocacy organisation called
“Hollaback!” and consider the role of technology in this type of digital fem-
inist activism, how participating feminist activists navigate and negotiate
the technology and platforms they utilise, the challenges that emerge in
doing anti-street harassment advocacy online, and who this type of action
may work for. I particularly consider the role of “owned” platforms (that
is, platforms that are run and owned by the organisation rather than cor-
porate social media sites), the blogosphere, data visualisation tools, and
organisational team-based platforms in street harassment advocacy. While
social media are used in Hollaback! activism, they play a minor role within
the campaign and are not the focus of this chapter. The following chap-
ters take a more concentrated look at the role of mainstream social media
platforms as well as the role of platform and web infrastructure in digital
feminist activism.
Through a consideration of the platforms and technology used, I explore
how Hollaback! activism has evolved from what I describe as a reactionary
form of activism to an established organisation that engages in deliberative
activism. I demonstrate how feminist activists have been able to engage in
a sustained form of anti-street harassment advocacy through Hollaback!
activism by utilising networked affordances and how these actions also con-
nect to other types of feminist activism. Throughout the chapter, I incorpo-
rate an ongoing critique of how intersectionality plays out at the different
levels and stages of Hollaback! and how existing power dynamics (especially
those related to race and class) are perpetuated. I also consider the role of
digital and quantitative data in feminist activism, how this complicates the
efficacy of street harassment advocacy, and consider the issues of aiming for
punitive measures as end goals for feminist activism.
I draw on interviews with seven site leaders from Hollaback! chapters in
the US, the UK, and Australia. Site leaders are the activists in charge of
each local chapter and are the administrators or moderators of each of the
blogs/websites that host the Hollaback! campaign, collect the submissions
and visualise the map pinpointing incidences of street harassment. The
chapter also includes an interview with one of the leaders from the “moth-
ership” (also known as the headquarters – the original Hollaback! group
located in New York City, which established the first blog). The organisers
interviewed were at different stages of their involvement with Hollaback!
Some of them had been involved for years, almost from the beginning
of the organisation. Others had just begun their training as site leaders
and were in the middle of establishing their local group. Further still, a
couple of former site leaders were also interviewed to provide insight into
the experience of transitioning away from Hollaback! Interviewing peo-
ple at different stages of their involvement with the organisation helped
provide a broader understanding of how activists engaged with and drew
on a range of digital tools in a rapidly shifting digital environment since
2005 when Hollaback! launched. The interviewees, along with the local
chapters that they were a part of, are predominately anonymised so they
could speak freely about the issues that they encountered while maintain-
ing their privacy.
The blogosphere
Inspired by Nguyen’s actions and their own shared experiences of street
harassment, a group of friends decided to create a blog they called
Hollaback! – with the term “Hollaback!” meaning a “response”. The blog
focused on empowering women to use mobile technology to challenge street
harassment; “If you can’t slam em, snap em” was the original tagline. While
this provided women with an immediate response to street harassment,
Hollaback! took the action further and encouraged those who had expe-
rienced street harassment to submit their story of harassment to the blog,
along with the location of the incident and a reflection of the experience.
Their submission would then take the form of a pin on a map, collectively
highlighting the pervasiveness and extent of street harassment. The inten-
tion behind the map was not to highlight unsafe spaces around New York
City but to illustrate the scale of street harassment.
Shortly after the launch of the blog in 2005, Hollaback! received an explo-
sion of submissions not just locally from within New York but nationally
and then internationally. Co-founder, Emily May, reflected on how surpris-
ing it was to receive so many submissions from women everywhere:
When we founded Hollaback, we didn’t know if street harassment hap-

pened to anybody else … we didn’t know if it was us, if it was a New
York City thing, if it was a young woman thing; we had no idea. But
we have found, through telling our stories, that this is an international
epidemic.
(Krieg 2011)
In this way, the blogosphere was an essential site for what was originally an
awareness-raising and solidarity action because of its interconnectedness,
scalability, and immediacy.
At this time, feminist communities had already developed on the blogo-
sphere, and this networked space provided a key site for women and girls
around the world to participate in and learn about feminism and politics.
Media studies scholars and activists have demonstrated and argued for the
recognition of girls’ and women’s blogging practices to be seen as a form
of political participation and have highlighted the value and meaning net-
worked feminist spaces have had for communities around the world. In
terms of the use of blogs in the West, Associate Professor of Critical Media
Studies Jessalynn Keller (2012) demonstrated the significance of feminist
blogging for North American girls, highlighting how they use blogging to
connect with a feminist community, develop their own political identity and
further learn about feminism. Researcher Frances Shaw (2012) drew atten-
tion to the power of the Australian feminist blogosphere and the political
potential of these online communities for discursive change. Shaw argues
that while individual blog posts are not necessarily politically significant,
the “network of interlinked blog posts” on a shared topic is significant.
It is the “interlinkage” and relationships between bloggers, the building
of networked communities, and the sharing and development of resources
that help to create a political network of discourse between activists and
the public.
This network holds even more significance for women and girls who may
be geographically located in totalitarian states or communities in which
they are unable to engage with feminist ideas publicly or in an identi-
fiable way. In my previous research with media theorist Olivia Guntarik
(Guntarik and Trott 2016), we examined the significance of social media
for Thai women’s political engagement during the 2013/14 Bangkok protests
and the added risks associated with speaking out against a ruling author-
ity online, a cost that is often underplayed and simply not a concern for
activists within Western democracies. Internet culture and gender studies
scholar Jillana Enteen (2005) also drew attention to the importance of the
blogosphere as a counterpublic network in which Thai women were able
to challenge racial and gendered oppressive images, particularly to subvert
stereotypes of themselves as highly sexual and subservient to Western men.
This kind of political participation “create(s) new communities with con-
stituents which extend the borders of the nation while reducing the power
of national images” (Enteen 2005, p. 477). Similar research has looked at
Muslim women’s use of online forums and, later, social media to collectively
develop gendered interpretations and alternative readings of Islamic scrip-
tures that challenge patriarchal conventions. Women studies scholar Anna
Piela (2015) reinforces the significance of these online networked sites for
women’s cultural productions as Muslim women have been largely excluded
from any decision-making in Islamic religious structures.
It is important to identify and reflect on the added costs of feminist digital
resistance for women and girls outside of Western democratic countries,
as Hollaback! originated from the conditions of New York City but then
scaled up across the globe into other non-Western and non-democratic set-
tings. The challenges, limitations and costs of this transnationalism will be
detailed throughout the discussion in this chapter.
Along with blogging, a strong online do-it-yourself (DIY) culture devel-
oped within feminist spaces and became associated with what has been con-
ceptualised as a “third-wave” of feminism. Youth sociologist Anita Harris
(2008) described this culture as encompassing blogs, forums, e-zines and
other websites that operate as spaces for expression and dialogue regarding
social and political issues in an informal and often personalised context.
The blogosphere and these alternative spaces provided a site for the flour-
ishing of counter-publics; a concept critical theorist Nancy Fraser devel-
oped in 1990 to help explain the sites, methods and collectives that produce
new, alternative or nondominant forms of knowledge, culture, and political
dialogue that challenge and subvert dominant forms of knowledge and the
historically exclusive norms of the mainstream public sphere. Extending
this concept into the digital realm, communication scholars Sarah J.
Jackson and Brooke Foucault Welles (2015, 2016) conceptualise “networked
counterpublics”, linking the significance of these to sociologist Manuel
Castell’s (2004) influential work on networked power and Jan van Dijk’s
(1999) “networked society”, arguing that networks of resistance can produce
“counterpower”, – “a type of power that challenges the power embedded in
institutions of society for the purpose of claiming representation for their
own values and interests”. Through the blogosphere, mobile technology and
later other platforms including social media, Hollaback! and the thousands
of participants who submitted and continue to submit their stories of street
harassment constitute a networked counter-public, and in fact, counter-
publics as multiple communities of resistance emerged across the globe to
provide narratives that challenged preconceived notions of street harass-
ment and cast in the spotlight a pervasive issue.
The blogosphere and mobile technology were key at providing the net-
worked infrastructure that brought these counter-publics together. As one
site leader, Britany2 reflected:
…The speed in which the issue has been catapulted to mainstream con-
versations…the issue of street harassment could not have happened
any other way besides online, complemented by on the ground organ-
ising. I’m a firm believer in grassroots community-based organising as
well. But the online component really sped up the process for people to
understand that street harassment is a form of gender-based violence,
that street harassment is a form of abuse and that it’s something that
shouldn’t be normalised or minimized.
(29 November 2016)
Britany also spoke about the importance of a digital network for building
a community and recognised the value of such a network for solidarity
amongst feminist activists, domestic violence workers, and victim-survivors:
I have been working in the field of gender-based violence for 15 years.

Prior to this, I was working in domestic violence advocacy and I was
interested in how Hollaback! was working at the intersection of technol-
ogy and social justice, which was a change from pretty much everything
else that I had done. Prior with the advocacy work, there was a lot of
having to deal with and navigate institutions like the court system, the
health care system—for people to access their basic needs as survivors.
The fact that Hollaback! was putting a sort of positive spin on fighting
back and speaking back and responding in some way—not necessarily
in the moment, but online–was really appealing to me because with all
the other forms of violence I’ve worked on, a lot of people are facing
isolation; they are sort of walking around with the impacts of abuse
and trauma and the violence and I feel like Hollaback! was mobilising
people to take space for themselves and to sort of broadcast what they
were experiencing in a way that created a community online.
Britany reflected that the large-scale expression of solidarity would not have
been possible without networked technology:
The aspect of connecting people globally on the issue wouldn’t have

happened without the technology and the platforms that we have. And,
so, seeing how this issue impacts people across the world in very similar
ways, I feel like that was something else that could only have happened
through the platforms we have.
Britany’s reflections here about the global nature of street harassment and
how networked technology and digital practices such as blogging can create
a global feminist solidarity network indicate a vision of feminist solidarity
across borders; a vision Women’s and Gender Studies Professor Chandra
Talpade Mohanty (1986, 2003) has interrogated in her seminal work Under
Western Eyes. Mohanty is one of the most influential gender theorists in her
conceptualisation of transnational feminism and her critique of Western
feminist colonial discourses. Transnational feminism emerged in part as a
critique of mainstream, second-wave feminism and its aspiration toward
developing a “global sisterhood” without recognising the multilayered and
complex system of oppression experienced by Third World women.
Mohanty envisions transnational feminism as a “feminist political pro-
ject” that operates within a framework of solidarity and shared values while
recognising and being attentive to the specificity of difference as well as the
power differences within and among various communities of women (2003,
p. 502). She emphasises “the importance of the particular in relation to the
universal – a belief in the local as specifying and illuminating the universal’
(2003, p. 503). For Mohanty, she is hopeful in her vision for a “noncoloniz-
ing feminist solidarity across borders” (2003, p. 503), and Hollaback! as a
case study offers an interesting example of mainstream feminist activism
and the struggles to develop such a noncolonising feminist network that
Mohanty envisions, within the digital era. Throughout the evolution of
Hollaback! from a reactive, awareness-raising protest to a deliberative, sus-
tained advocacy organisation, the activists grapple with colonial discourses
and structures while also attempting to build a transnational, cross-cultural
movement. Some of these contradictions and struggles will be explored later
in this chapter along with a consideration of how digital platforms contrib-
ute to the spread of Western and colonising discourses within digital femi-
nist activism.
The tremendous amount of participation and the awareness that was built
from such a large-scale response prompted the organisers to realise they
needed to move the campaign beyond simply a consciousness-raising initi-
ative. The New York group started to look for ways to campaign at a local
level, including working with the New York City government to ultimately
create policy and legislative change to support victims to report incidents
and to educate the community about street harassment. This shift also made
clear the challenges of hosting a map and a blog for international experi-
ences of street harassment when they needed a more localised approach
to campaign for change. Activists in other cities and even countries also
realised the importance of localising the action to move beyond the initial
consciousness-raising stage and to provide culturally specific framings to
the campaign in their own communities. As a result, several new blogs were
created to represent Hollaback! in different cities and countries.
The initial momentum of the movement led to the launch of 20 differ-
ent Hollaback! blogs and the groups behind these blogs became known as
“chapters”. Engaging in third-wave feminist DIY culture (Harris 2008),
these new chapters created their own Wordpress blogs, using diverse themes,
varying language, and collected personalised submissions using different
parameters. These chapters also incorporated their own designs and brand-
ing styles while attempting to draw on the Hollaback! name. One of the origi-
nal organisers from the early days of Hollaback! reflected on how these other
chapters and blogs were barely recognisable as part of the same collective.
Action researcher and technology developer Jill Dimond, who volunteered
with Hollaback from 2010 and helped develop aspects of their technological
infrastructure, identified that only three out of the original twenty chapters
remained active by 2010. This was in part because many of the new site lead-
ers struggled to sustain their chapters with a lack of resources and had no
previous activist experience, rendering them unprepared and ill-equipped
for the amount of work required to sustain the blog and the chapter.
After most of these early chapters had dissolved, one of the origi-
nal co-founders Emily May decided to devote more of her time to make
Hollaback! an international movement and transitioned to a full-time role
with the organisation. To help sustain the movement across different chap-
ters, the original founders decided to organise Hollaback! as a federation
of sites coordinated by the New York City chapter, which became known
as the “mothership”. There was a collective decision to assist the creation
of new Hollaback! chapters beyond organic replications and to ensure
that there was more consistency to help the newer chapters and ensure the
Hollaback! campaign was recognisable across each blog. As a result, what
began as a collective of friends behind the original Hollaback! blog has
since developed into an international organisation with chapters in 79 cities
and 26 countries.
Hollaback! officially became a non-for-profit in 2010, with May becom-
ing the organisation’s first full-time executive director and the establish-
ment of a board of directors. Debjani Roy, the former Deputy Director of
Hollaback!, described the model to me in an interview: “We have a board
of directors, we have an advisory board, and then we have our site leaders
around the world. And we have a staff of five people in New York” (personal
interview 2016). Currently, there are three paid staff members at Hollaback!
headquarters, including co-founder and Executive Director Emily May. In
addition, a range of internal committees have been established, and site/
chapter leaders are expected to volunteer on different committees to share
their own resources and answer the concerns of newer Hollaback! activists.
The idea of this structure is to ensure the organisation remains up to date
regarding the actions and concerns that each group is addressing and to
provide some kind of accountability in terms of the local chapters partici-
pating in the campaigns that the “mothership” sets. The organisation is now
involved in a range of different actions and campaigns, with its primary goal
set to ending street harassment.
The blogosphere and the heightened connectivity and visibility it afforded
combined with the mainstream media attention Nguyen’s story received,
enabled large-scale participation and organisation in anti-street harassment
activism and along with a transnational interconnectivity between counter-
publics and the blending of different modes of activism; moving from a
reactive protest to a deliberative organisation. Key to the development and
sustaining of deliberative, activist organisations and the cultivation of a
feminist community is the development of an owned platform.
Owned platforms
As Hollaback! evolved as an organisation, so did the rapidly changing dig-
ital environment as we witnessed the rise of mainstream corporate social
media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Yet Hollaback! retained and
further developed their Wordpress multisite framework instead of shifting
to social media platforms. For Hollaback! Wordpress operated as platform
architecture— that is, the foundation upon which Hollaback! content, services
and the community is built and through which “data flows are managed, pro-
cessed, stored, and channelled” (Van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal 2018, p. 13).
While the initial use of Wordpress and blogs in 2005 was in part due to
the blogosphere playing a more dominant role in the mainstream online
counter-public sphere, and the absence of dominant social media platforms
such as Twitter, the ongoing use of Wordpress as the base and the shift to the
development of an official domain-owned website coincides with the evolu-
tion of Hollaback! from a reactionary, awareness-raising protest, to a more
deliberative, sustained formal activist organisation.
The Wordpress website is an example of an “owned platform”. I use here
the term “owned platform” to refer to a site or platform that is either built or
controlled by a particular organisation as opposed to social media platforms
on which organisations may operate, but they do not own or necessarily
control the experience or data. These can also be referred to as “on-domain
platforms” as they are typically the organisation’s domain (e.g. ihollaback.
org). Owned platforms offer feminist activists an array of potential to estab-
lish or configure a system that embodies feminist politics through data
practices, privacy policies, algorithms and interfaces, ownership, business
models and user agreements – the elements that Van Dijck, Poell, and de
Waal (2018) identify as key to mutually shaping a platform’s influence and
shaping sociality. For digital feminist activism such as Hollaback! maintain-
ing an owned platform, or an on-domain platform, provides the activists
control over the community, how users experience and navigate the plat-
form, establishing the culture and values of the community, and what kind
of data is collected and shared in the curation of street harassment.
Further, by providing website templates for new chapters, the Hollaback!
mothership is able to maintain consistency, control, regulate and support
new chapters. Some of the chapter site leaders identified the resources the
mothership provided them, recognising how the templates, guides and
induction sessions supported them in the development of their chapter.
Former site leader Polly reflected that:
They give you a branding guide and access to all their information,
like educational tools and things… We used Wordpress as a website.
They would give you the bare bones of it and you’d just have to fill it
out so people would share their stories on the website and you’d have to
include the location of where the street harassment incident was, and it
would pin it to the map. So, you could see densely populated areas; it
was really handy. It was an interactive website. (27 May 2016)
Owned platforms, such as the Hollaback! Wordpress framework, provide

the infrastructure to connect chapters around the world with the mother-
ship and provide a space on which to develop a digital toolbox of activist
tactics, including Hollaback! maps for each location. By providing website
templates, the mothership was able to ensure new chapters remained part
of the same overarching Hollaback! domain. The separation of websites
based on chapter location was also a way for Hollaback! to adopt a partially
decentralised organisational structure.
The organisational structure of the mothership, as well as the structure of
some of the local chapters, is hierarchical with site leaders and co-directors.
However, they aspire to be a decentralised global organisation, as Debjani
Roy reflected:
With such a small staff … that’s why we really rely on a decentralised

model where we have committees that manage tech concerns. We have a
committee of site leaders that manage issues around diversity and inclu-
sion, a committee that deals with research, a committee that deals with
ongoing training. We have an internal system in place so that the work
is really led by the site leaders. (29 November 2016)
Decentralised or horizontal organisational structures have long been a core

characteristic and aspiration of feminist activism. Professor Megan Boler
and co-author Christina Nitsou (2014) investigate the capability of the web
to subvert hierarchical structures through an analysis of women activists
involved in the Occupy Wall Street protests. They believe that horizontal-
ism is instrumental in this liberation by offering opportunities for alter-
native and historically oppressed voices to assume a type of “leadership”
and that movements incorporating an organisationally horizontal struc-
ture are committing to challenging ingrained social biases and are lead-
ing by example. Many feminist scholars and activists have advocated for
the adoption of horizontal and decentralised structures within the feminist
movement because it provides, or at least promises to provide, the oppor-
tunity for minority voices to be heard, attempts to deconstruct patriarchal
power dynamics, and level the playing field from within. Boler and Nitsou
(2014, p. 281) argue that digital technologies enable a logic of organisation
that is centred on the “co-production and sharing based on personalised
expression”. Individuals are able to adapt a movement’s message to their
own lifestyle and beliefs and can contribute to the cause and surrounding
discussions in ways that are relevant and accessible to them. In this way,
social and digital technologies enable the potential for women’s voices to be
elevated and for feminist activists to contribute to the creation of their own
narratives and meaning.
However, in operation, this principle of an equal playing field for voices
to emerge is often too idealistic, and offline power dynamics are frequently
mapped onto and embedded into digital platforms and architecture. In the
case of Hollaback!, several challenges emerged in the adaptation of the cam-
paign to localised contexts and the creation of webpages for different local
and regional contexts; an important process for noncolonial transnational
feminism. The activists at the Hollaback! mothership recognised the need
for adapting the campaign and providing other chapters, particularly in
non-Western locations, with the resources to help them in this process. Yet,
a number of issues and colonial structures can be found embedded within
the platform infrastructure and design, as well as Hollaback!’s broader
organisational structure. These are important to interrogate and reflect
upon if we are to move toward developing a decolonised, cross-border fem-
inist community as Mohanty envisions.
One of the organisers from the mothership described the process of estab-
lishing local chapters:
The people we train is usually a team of two or more people. Pretty

much, they just contact us, and they say they want to start a site in their
location and if there’s no site there, then we sign them up for the train-
ing. If there is an existing site, then we connect them with whoever’s
already there. We have more city sites than country sites because … we
want the knowledge to be as localised as possible so that people can
develop on the ground actions in a way that’s responsive to the needs of
the community. (29 November 2016)
However, some of the chapter leaders revealed issues in terms of how the
templates were developed by the mothership in a US context and how
they did not translate well in particular localised contexts. For exam-
ple, there was a Western and English-speaking bias that could partially
be attributed to the design and structure of the campaign website. One
activist from the mothership recognised this bias in the chapters that had
developed and described how the local adaptation of the campaign was
mostly left to the individual chapters:
Most people who sign up to start a site are usually English speakers, as
well as their mother tongue, so most people are proficient in English.
But we do translations for sites so they can function bilingually or even
trilingual. We are able to accommodate that, but we do rely on the site
leaders to do the translation for their sites; we just provide the system
for them to do it. (29 November 2016)
The “system” provided here is the digital platform and infrastructure upon
which to build localised chapters. In her PhD dissertation reflecting on
her own work with Hollaback! as a technological developer, Jill Dimond
discussed how at times she was uneasy with the hierarchical structure of
Hollaback! and aspired to build support into the technological framework
that would enable and value horizontal organising, spread technical power,
and promote decentralised control over individual sites (2012, p. 31). In
this way, the technology can help shape and enforce local approaches to
a transnational action. Yet, at the same time, there were some structures
embedded onto the individual sites that did map colonial frameworks onto
the organisation.
One site leader identified how the platform structure reinforced exist-
ing power dynamics within the Hollaback! organisation. This site leader
described how, “The ‘donate’ button embedded on all sites goes to the ‘moth-
ership’ PayPal and not the local chapter whose site you might be v isiting”
(Alex 19 November 2016). This highlights how the design of the platform can
contribute to perpetuating particular structures and world views. The site
leader felt that this contributed to delegitimising the cause in some regions
as it seemed extractive from the labour conducted by the local site leaders,
and the donations were not necessarily returned to the region.
Another site leader also expressed frustration about the financial struc-
tures of the organisation and how it contributed to an uneven power dynamic
between the localised chapters and the New York mothership:
The headquarters is a non-profit in New York; but for a really long time,
there was quite a weird power imbalance where they obviously were
running an organisation. It’s a small group of people, but they are get-
ting paid. There is a board, but it’s in New York and then you have 40 to
50 cities all around the world. People in really different circumstances
are taking on this issue in their communities and exposing themselves
to risks sometimes, who are not getting paid and there is obviously
within that a power imbalance. (Britany 15 December 2016)
In some regions, there are political barriers that create a heightened risk
for site leaders in their participation in Hollaback! activism and as a result
several Hollaback! chapters are run anonymously. There were also several
instances when chapter leaders reported that Executive Director Emily May
visited their region and spoke publicly about Hollaback! with or without the
local site leaders’ knowledge or inclusion. In the case of the Buenos Aires
chapter that Dimond (2012, p. 63) explores, the New York City group became
the dominant voice due to the local chapter leader’s lack of experience and
minimal local support network. This created tension within the local com-
munity as Argentines felt it was a Western organisation and Western women
critiquing and attacking them and their culture. Similarly, two of the site
leaders for other chapters in Western contexts that I interviewed, expressed
frustration at times when May spoke publicly to local media without con-
sulting them as they felt she did not adequately represent their chapter nor
engaged with the localised discourses relevant to their community.
One site leader, Alex, was more scathing in their problematisation of the
relationship between paid White-American staff and the large number of
unpaid women of colour who ran local chapters. They spoke about how
Hollaback! prides itself on its diverse site leaders, with “75% under the age
of 30; 41% LGBTQ; and 33% people of colour” (Alex 19 November 2016)
The site leader argued that the majority of Hollaback! activists are margin-
alised and that the work they are doing is unpaid labour, which becomes
problematic when the money they fundraise goes to the mothership and the
white leaders. Alex went on to argue that the organisation was essentially
funded on the “unpaid labour and exploitation of marginalised bodies”.
This hierarchical and colonial structure is further reinforced by the plat-
form architecture. The local Hollaback! sites are hosted on the same domain
as the main site (run by the mothership), yet they do not have access to this
main site so exist as a sub-site, revealing an implicit hierarchy in the structure
of the mothership and subordinate sites (a point also made by Dimond in her
dissertation). This also has significance when we consider data ownership, and
the frameworks developed to conceptualise data privacy and terms of service.
Feminist platform policies

One of the benefits of operating on an owned platform is the ability to con-
trol and develop your own governance framework, including the terms of
service and privacy policies for users and participants, as opposed to being
subjected to the policies and guidelines laid out by commercial social media
platforms. The Hollaback! example offers us a look at what a feminist Terms
of Service (ToS) and Privacy Policy (PP) may look like in practice within the
digital sphere and provides insight into how power is built within the plat-
form and consequently embedded within digital feminist activist practices.
At the bottom of each Hollaback! website is a link to the single ToS and
PP used for all Hollaback! chapter sites. The ToS and PP are constructed
from a US context and are applied to international chapters embedding
data ownership and control to the US-based organisation, and the mother-
ship rather than with the local chapters. The PP includes a specific section
for “International Users” and outlines that users accessing Hollaback! ser-
vices (which includes local chapter websites) are consenting to the “transfer
of your information to the United States for processing and maintenance”
and are “consenting to the application of United States law” (Hollaback!
2016a). This explicitly highlights the structure of the organisation with the
Western and US framework being applied across all chapters and demon-
strates a colonial mechanism in which US law supersedes regional policies
and/or concerns. A transnational feminist approach would ideally develop
such policies in collaboration, allowing for data sovereignty by local chap-
ters and ensuring a privacy framework that addresses and is attune to the
specific concerns and regulations relating to local and regional contexts.
We see such consideration of regional differences in the inclusion of
Californian-specific privacy rights. Other than this, there is no other spe-
cific catering toward different regional rights, particularly for outside of
the US context. This is particularly surprising given the introduction of
the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which was developed in
2016 and came into effect in 2018 and applies to EU citizens, regulating and
restricting the transfer of data outside of the EU as well. There are a number
of Hollaback! chapters in operation within Europe but no indication in the
Hollaback! data privacy policy about compliance with the GDPR.
Within the PP, several points are emphasised and that convey key values
of the organisation and the feminist activism they engage in. “Maintaining
trust” is a phrase used to frame the use of data and the disclosure of infor-
mation and Hollaback! emphasises they are committed to maintaining user
trust by being transparent with users about how their data may be used and
importantly by ensuring users are informed about the information or data
that is collected. “Consent” is also emphasised to assure users feel empow-
ered and have some control over how their information and data is used.
And “anonymity” is mentioned several times in line with standard ethical
practices in which user data and information will be anonymised when dis-
closed to other parties. In terms of how data is used and who it is shared
with, Hollaback! makes clear that they will not “sell or share” user data
with other companies for marketing purposes, and that they may disclose
anonymised information with third-party researchers and universities for
research purposes and for legislators for advocacy purposes. This is not
surprising given Hollaback! is an advocacy organisation, but it does consol-
idate their purpose, goals, and priorities: to collect data (such as harassment
stories) to research and learn more about the issue of street harassment and
to advocate for legislative change in the fight to end street harassment. As
with most social media platforms that rely on user-generated content, the
Hollaback! policies maintain that content created and submitted by users
remains owned by the users and that they grant Hollaback! a “royalty-free,
perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide and fully sublicensable
right and license to use” (Hollaback! 2016b) content.
Operating on an owned platform, or a domain-name platform, enables
feminist organisations to frame their own terms of service and data privacy
policies in line with their ideology, practices, and purposes. It also means
they are mostly able to maintain control over the types of data that are col-
lected and how and who it is shared with. However, it also means they have
more responsibility in terms of how the platform is designed and structured,
and while this can be empowering and offer the potential to design a space
that embodies feminist principles, it also requires substantially more labour
and technical expertise to build and maintain such a platform, not to men-
tion financial resources. The Hollaback! platform is not perfect, and the
example demonstrates some of the issues inherent within mainstream (and
generally white) feminist activism, especially in terms of how colonial v alues
can be embedded within a platform’s design. However, the Hollaback! web-
site is just one part of a broader ecosystem of technologies and platforms
Hollaback! activism relies on.
Notes
1 While it is not within the scope of this chapter, or book, to further define street
harassment and the harms it causes, I will refer the reader to the countless
women who have worked hard to make visible the affects and implications
of what Deirdre Davis terms “spirit murder”. Some notable contemporary
voices on this topic are Criminology researchers Bianca Fileborn and Tully
O’Neill (2021) who provide an effective overview of the field of research on
street harassment.
2 All interviewees have been given a pseudonym.
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Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Fir-Tree
Fairy Book: Favorite Fairy Tales
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.
Title: The Fir-Tree Fairy Book: Favorite Fairy Tales
Editor: Clifton Johnson
Illustrator: Alexander Popini
Release date: May 14, 2022 [eBook #68071]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Little, Brown, and Company,

1912
Credits: Charlene Taylor, Barry Abrahamsen, and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIR-

TREE FAIRY BOOK: FAVORITE FAIRY TALES ***
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public
domain.
YOU SAW
these little men
on the cover guarding the
road that leads to Fairy Land.
Do you believe in Fairy Land?
If so, they will let you pass. If
not, they will make you
turn back the way you
came and will not let
you into
THE FIR-TREE FAIRY

BOOK
THE PIED PIPER ORDERS THE RATS INTO THE WATER
THE
FIR-TREE
FA I RY
BOOK
FAV OR I T E FA I RY TA L E S
EDITED BY
CLIFTON JOHNSON
I L L U S T R AT E D B Y
ALEXANDER POPINI
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, & COMPANY
1912
Copyright, 1912,
By Little, Brown, and Company.
─────
All rights reserved
Published, November, 1912
THE COLONIAL PRESS

C. H. SIMONDS & CO., BOSTON, U.S.A.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
I
N the volumes that make up this series of fairy books are to be
found the favorite wonder tales of many nations in a version
especially suited for the home fireside. The interest, the charm
and all the sweetness of the stories have been retained, but
savagery, distressing details and excessive pathos have been
dropped, and the books can be read aloud or placed in the hands of
children with entire confidence.
The reasons for such changes as I have made in the stories are
perhaps self-evident. Surely, most parents and teachers will agree
that our little people are better off without some of the sentiments of
the barbaric past when the tales originated. We can well spare most
of the spectacles of falsehood, gluttony, drunkenness, torture and
gore that are found in the usual tellings, and we can get along
without the cruel fathers and wicked stepmothers. Civilization and
culture have advanced vastly since the time when the stories started.
Our primal instincts are more controlled, and law, education and
ethics mean vastly more. The necessity therefore seems clear for
softening or changing the crude ideals and doubtful morals and
coarseness that have so often survived in the old stories.
The tales are drawn from many sources, and usually are the result
of a comparison of several versions, and a combination of the best
features of these versions into a simple straightforward whole such
as children will read with understanding and pleasure.
The plan I have indicated was begun with “The Oak-Tree Fairy
Book,” the initial volume of this tree named series, and has been
consistently pursued in all the later volumes.
Clifton Johnson.
Hadley, Mass.
CONTENTS
SOURCE PAGE
The Pied Piper England 3

The Fir-Tree Andersen 14
The Babes in the Wood England 27
Alexander Jones Scotland 35
The Sleeping Beauty Grimm 43
The Love of the Snow- Japan 52
White Fox
The Grazier’s Wife Spain 56
The Magic Horn Norway 60
The Envious Neighbor Siam 72
Bluebeard France 76
The Spendthrift Russia 84
Merchant’s Son
The Ambitious Thrush India 92
The Bewitched Bottles Ireland 99
A Peace Meeting China 117
The Soldier and the France 121
Dragon
The Fairies of Merlin’s Scotland 134
Crag
The Little Boy and the Big England 141
Cow
A Bottle of Brains England 144
The Peddler of Swaffham England 154
The Orange Fairy Turkey 158
The Mysterious Voice Roumania 173
Johnny Gloke England 179
Hans the Hedgehog Grimm 184
The Magpie’s Nest England 194
Puss in Boots France 197
The Master and His Pupil England 208
The White Trout Ireland 213
The Forty-nine Dragons Greece 217
The Four Clever Brothers Grimm 233
The Youth Without Fear Grimm 242
The Wonderful Turnip Grimm 259
The Enchanted Dove Grimm 264
The Three Wishes England 270
The Old Horse Grimm 276
The Donkey Cabbages Grimm 279
Sweet Porridge Grimm 290
The Praying Geese Grimm 292
The Darning Needle Andersen 294
The Rabbit and the Greedy India 300
Monkey
The Nightingale Andersen 306
The Princess and the Giant Ireland 325
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
The Pied Piper orders the Frontispiece

rats into the water
The Mayor hears 6
something
The fir-tree 16
The babes in the wood 31
They ran around the table 37
The sleeping beauty 48
There were hunters who 52
wanted to kill the fox
Barbara admires herself in 58
the mirror
Philip blew into the large 67
end of his horn
He gathered all the gold he 74
could carry
At the door of Bluebeard’s 78
secret room
They carried him away 89
through the air
The thrush in her new 95
clothes
Two tiny men climbed out 109

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Feminist Activism and Platform Politics

1st Edition Verity Anne Trott

Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art Activism in

Towards a Feminist Translator Studies : Intersectional

Care Crisis and Activism The Politics of Everyday Life

Awkward Politics Technologies of Popfeminist Activism

Heritage Movements in Asia Cultural Heritage Activism

Feminist Animal Studies Theories Practices Politics 1st

Researching War Feminist Methods Ethics and Politics

Feminist African Philosophy Women and the Politics of

Trott interrogates how feminist activists navigate complex technological

Verity Anne Trott is Lecturer in Digital Media Research in the School of

“Feminist Activism and Platform Politics provides a timely and com-

Verity Anne Trott

Typeset in Times New Roman

Introduction: Feminist platform politics 1

1 The blogosphere and feminist-owned platforms 15

2 Mapping tools, organisational platforms, and online communities 33

3 Social media platforms and toxic-techno cultures 52

4 Negotiating feminist values on social media platforms 73

6 Web infrastructure and alt-tech 116

On 19 August 2017, I woke up to dozens of emails from Academia.edu to

What are platforms?

Digital feminist activism

Feminism is a movement in many senses. We are moved to become

Ahmed touches on several important elements to understanding feminism

Studying digital feminist activism

The Hollaback! story

When we founded Hollaback, we didn’t know if street harassment hap-

I have been working in the field of gender-based violence for 15 years.

The aspect of connecting people globally on the issue wouldn’t have

Owned platforms, such as the Hollaback! Wordpress framework, provide

With such a small staff … that’s why we really rely on a decentralised

Decentralised or horizontal organisational structures have long been a core

The people we train is usually a team of two or more people. Pretty

Feminist platform policies

Title: The Fir-Tree Fairy Book: Favorite Fairy Tales

Editor: Clifton Johnson

Illustrator: Alexander Popini

Release date: May 14, 2022 [eBook #68071]

Original publication: United States: Little, Brown, and Company,

Credits: Charlene Taylor, Barry Abrahamsen, and the Online

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIR-

THE FIR-TREE FAIRY

Published, November, 1912

THE COLONIAL PRESS

The Pied Piper England 3

The Pied Piper orders the Frontispiece

You might also like

Introduction: Feminist platform politics 1

1 The blogosphere and feminist-owned platforms 15

2 Mapping tools, organisational platforms, and online communities 33

3 Social media platforms and toxic-techno cultures 52

4 Negotiating feminist values on social media platforms 73

6 Web infrastructure and alt-tech 116