CEVAW’s Workshop on TFGBV in NY

Given the global pushback on using words like “gender,” “diversity,” and “feminist,” calling for a workshop on gendered violence and digital platforms is a risky move in and of itself. However, as research in the field of technology-facilitated violence consistently shows, experiences of abuse on apps are strongly gendered and reflect pre-existing patterns of marginalisation. Those targeted are typically women and members of LGBTQIA+ communities, while perpetrators are commonly men. People with disabilities, Indigenous people, and people from migrant backgrounds report being directly targeted based on their perceived differences.

While most technology providers and platforms (such as Meta and Google) have developed reporting mechanisms for online abuse, these reporting measures can be dead-ends that do not lead to users being blocked from the platforms. For example, despite issues like “nudify” apps and deepfakes revenge porn being widespread on platforms, and despite the use of platforms to facilitate coordinated misogynistic harassment campaigns, the response by companies and regulators has largely been too little, too late. Therefore, this workshop aims to bring together a small group of researchers interested in working together to further investigate and address the types of gender-based violence that technology companies both facilitate through their platforms and obscure through obsolete reporting mechanisms and black-boxed socio-technical systems.

In this workshop we ask: how are technology providers and platforms responding to the detection and reporting of online gender-based violence? What are the types of prevention policies and strategies being put in place? How do these policies and mechanisms fall short in different cultural contexts due to language and other barriers? More broadly, we want to discuss what kind of possibilities there are for tackling these issues beyond techno-solutionist narratives about transformation and progress?