This post includes images and discussions of gender violence, which may be distressing for some readers. Please take care of yourself and seek support if needed.
In August 2025, Usikimye —a Kenyan feminist organization— launched Maskan, a visual and sensory exhibition on femicide in Kenya. The exhibition was chilling, as there were both visual and audio art installations of real-life stories of women who had been killed, raped, mutilated, or all the above. In Kenya, feminists have been organizing anti-femicide marches across the country, with the largest recorded march held in January 2024. And yet about 127 cases of femicide were reported in the first quarter of 2025 alone, in what has been described as a “disturbing surge”.
Femicide and other forms of gendered based violence, are not unique to Kenya alone. In September 2025, the Ni Una Menos movement from Argentina took to the streets once again to protest the torture and triple femicide of Morena Verri (20), Brenda Loreley Del Castillo (20) y Lara Morena Gutiérrez (15) highlighting the intersection of poverty, precarious living conditions, and the narcotics industry impacting the bodies and lives of women and girls. “No life is disposable” was the motto of the activists, in collective response to a crime which had been livestreamed to a closed group of 45 people on Instagram. In South Africa —the home of the #TotalShutDown movement in the week leading up to the G20 summit— women called for economic shutdowns in a silent protest against femicide and other forms of violence in a country where in 2019 it was reported that a woman was killed every 3 hours.
There is no safety from gender based violence, whether you are a president, a presidential aspirant, an Olympic champion, a child, a market vendor, a content creator, or a regular user of the internet. Feminists have always posited that the violence women experience online, or Technology-facilitated Gender Based Violence (TFGBV), is an extension of the violence experienced offline. In one corner of the Maskan exhibition room hang screenshots of tweets and comments on different social media platforms, and quotes by people (mostly men) ranging from “rape jokes” to celebrations of violence to apathy.
For women and gender expansive persons Maskan’s documentation of the breadth and extent of violence against us is not a surprise: we watch the news, we read and hear the stories, and many of us are survivors of one or multiple forms of gender based violence ourselves.
The politics of language, tech, and online gender based violence
Technology-facilitated Gender Violence (TFGV) takes many forms, some akin to the pictures shared from people’s social media posts at the exhibition, and others more overt or insidious, including surveillance, cyberbullying, stalking, doxxing, non-consensual sharing of images, etc. There are as many forms as there are cases/reports of abuse and abusers. Every day, with the advancement of technology and the permeation of AI into our existence, new ways of harassing/abusing women are being invented.
The systemic inaction to violence or the failure in its prevention has been blamed on the fact that gender based violence occurs mostly in the private sphere, where only the victim and perpetrator exist. Yet, even with an audience, (the kind that technology has made possible), violence still thrives. For example in August 2025, Meta finally took down a Facebook group of 32000 men who for six years since 2019, had used the platform to share non-consensual intimate images of their spouses. Mass/Mainstream media also remains a key promoter of gender violence through perpetuation of harmful stereotypes, trivialing violence through watered down language, victim blaming narratives, and also platforming abusers. In a 2022 UN Women mapping, global trends in media showed a correlation between news media reporting on gender based violence and the normalization of said violence.
We witness the monetization of hate when tech companies platform boost redpill content that uses extreme misogyny and promotes violence against women. The virality of this content has continued to actively harm women and queer folks and endanger their digital presence and both digital and physical security. Even when community outcries result in the accounts being taken down, the opacity of the internet allows perpetrators to rebrand and reinvent themselves, again facing little to no resistance from platforms.
In contrast to the thriving ecosystem of misogyny online, feminists questioning people in power or seeking accountability for violence have their content taken down. Black and queer creators are especially targeted under the same pretexts of “community guidelines” and “safety”, while tech companies continue platforming abuse and actively labelling it as “free speech” while censoring efforts for justice. These situations evoke the question who is considered part of this community then?
Closely related to this censorship is the silencing that happens when tech companies water down violence through the policing of language via algorithmic control. On platforms like TikTok, creators are not allowed to use words such as “rape”, sex, sexual assault, etc., and instead have to find alternative, less “triggering” words. This is a form of algorithmic censorship of the experience of 1 in 3 women in the world.
It Takes a Village! #16DaysofActivism of Finding, Strengthening, and Sustaining Feminist Community
Despite the ways in which these tech companies have bastardized “community” while simultaneously avoiding all accountability for the harm they cause, feminists have, as always, stepped up. It is feminists who continue to frame online violence as part of the everyday violence womxn experience. It is feminists who respond to this scourge with quick-witted, fiery posts that dismantle misogynistic ideas and uplift womxn. It is feminist community supporting survivors and putting in place solutions beyond carceral and punitive approaches.
They do this through initiatives like the Maskan exhibition, the Feminist Principles of the Internet, which insists that the internet must be a safe and inclusive space for everyone, and campaigns like Take Back The Tech calling for a reclamation of control and agency over technology to make it free of gender based violence.
These #16DaysOfActivism, we amplify the work of the many feminist collectives, initiatives, organizations, and individuals whose labor makes the technologies and internet we use a little safer. For example:
- Feminists rights defenders who design safer and joyful online spaces, like HER Internet in Uganda.
- Communities that support survivors online and offline, like Vita Activa in Latin America, and many other Feminists Helplines.
- Data activists, content creators and curators, knowledge sharers, and feminist Wikimedia campaigners who upload, update, and keep public knowledge open and free from disinformation and misinformation.
- Queer digital story tellers and archivists like Hola Africa who continue to produce knowledge on sex and sexuality online despite censorship.
- Repositories, resources, and digital security advice already available at a one-click distance, like the Data Detox Kit by Tactical Tech
- Specific resources and networks like Glitch and others, led by and for Black, Dalit, Indigenous, Migrant, Trans, Disabled women, with intersectionality and accessibility in mind.
We definitely cannot mention them all, but we invite you to add to the list..
Call to Action: #16TranslationDays
From 25 November to 10 December 2025, feminists around the world unite to demand an end of gender-based violence. This year, this UN global campaign focuses on technology-facilitated gender violence (TFGBV), and calls organizations, collectives and individuals to advocate and take action for safer and joyful spaces for women and girls online.
With this theme so closely related to our work , we were curious about how this topic is represented on Wikipedia. By November 2025 the Wikipedia article on Online gender-based violence only existed in 6 languages. (while Wikipedia has 358 language versions so far). This conspicuous lack of representation for a problem that disproportionately affects women and LGBTQI+ people is yet another manifestation of the Wikipedia gender gap. And it is also a proxy of the still-limited global awareness about this particular form of gender violence, which has been well documented by a broad range of actors, from global institutions to local feminist collectives.
During the 16 Days of Activism 2025, our call to action to our Feminist Community is to come together to translate into different languages this essential article that doesn’t exist yet in many Wikipedias! By the time of publishing this blog, we already have feminists doing translations in Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, and Luganda.
As we join feminists everywhere to commemorate the annual #16DaysOfActivism, join us in the #16DaysOfTranslation to create or improve Wikipedia articles in different languages, and add more structured data on Wikidata about online gender-based violence.
