Unsafe by Design - An Analysis of Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence Womankind Worldwide

Acknowledgments

This analysis report was produced by Womankind Worldwide and written by Womankind consultants, including Irene Mwendwa, with review, writing contributions and extensive guidance provided by Jill Anami, Kavinya E. Makau and Sally Gift (Womankind Worldwide).

Special thanks go to Womankind partners, allies and staff whose vital knowledge and expertise helped shape this analysis. The report draws on evidence and insights from national and regional parallel reports, and the lived realities shared by partners in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nepal, Uganda and Zimbabwe, as well as contributions from women’s rights sector allies and tech and gender experts.

Foreword

Technology facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) is no longer just an emerging risk but an escalating reality targeting, silencing and harming women and girls in all their diversities. As digital spaces advance, TFGBV magnifies the existing gendered inequalities, and is reshaping the landscape of violence in ways that demand our urgent and coordinated, action.

The harassment, sexual exploitation, and silencing that women and girls face offline is now being amplified through online coordinated digital attacks. These harms are widespread, affecting women and girls across contexts and identities, yet institutional responses continue to underestimate the complexity of the problem. Further more, we see individuals who identify as LBTQIA+, people with disabilities, minority groups, human rights defenders, activists, journalists, and leaders face heightened risks in digital spaces.

The report, Unsafe by Design: An Analysis of the TFGBV Continuum, draws on the experiences and expertise of Womankind’s partners and feminist movements across our focus countries and beyond. Whilst it highlights how technology is being weaponised against women and girls; it focuses on the strong resistance and creative solutions already being led by women’s rights organisations and defenders. The report includes A Vision for Feminist Digital Futures, with strategies to prevent online harm, which centre the experience, voice, and agency of all women and girls, and advocate for the creation of digital spaces that are truly safe, inclusive, and accessible.

Finally, the report sets out key recommendations for governments, technology companies, donors, and civil society to work together, focusing on three critical areas:

• Safety By Design

• Improvement in Content Moderation and Enforcement

• Transparency and Accountability

We hope this report strengthens advocacy, informs action, and contributes to building safer digital and physical spaces for all women and girls everywhere. Our goal is a digital world that reflects feminist values of joy, choice, and dignity. It is time to reboot the system and make it safer, not by chance, but by design. Let’s begin!

Disha and Diana Co- CEOs Womankind Worldwide

Part I: TFGBV Over the Years

Introduction

Since 2020, there has been a growing body of literature highlighting the rise of Gender Based Violence, particularly with technology as the centre. Before a unified definition was arrived at, several terms were used to describe this growing phenomenon. Terms such as digital abuse, cyber violence, cyber aggression, online violence, and online harassment were used to describe this type of abuse and were often used interchangeably.

However, these terms focused narrowly on violence occurring in online platforms and excluded forms of abuse enacted through other forms of technology that may not be connected to the internet , such as radio, GPS, tracking devices, drone technology, recording devices, cameras and even mobile phones (Rutgers International, 2024). They also failed to capture the gendered nature of this abuse, yet research had consistently demonstrated that women and girls are disproportionately affected by technology mediated abuse . Lastly, the lack of common terminology limited the ability of institutions to gather and compare data, align legislation and design coherent policy responses to this type of abuse (Rutgers International, 2024).

In November 2022, the UN Women responded to this challenge and convened global experts to develop a shared term and common conceptual definition of online violence against women (UN Women, 2024). They came up with the term technology-facilitated violence against women (TFVAW) and defined it as “any act, that is committed, assisted, aggravated or amplified by the use of ICTs or other digital tools, that results in or is likely to result in physical, sexual, psychological, social, political or economic harm, or other infringements of rights and freedoms”. They also noted that this term could be substituted with technologyfacilitated Gender Based Violence (TFGBV), acknowledging that, like other forms of GBV, TFGBV is rooted in discriminatory gender norms (UN Women, 2024). For this report, we will use the term TFGBV as we recognise its gendered nature.

This report is guided by Womankind Worldwide’s mandate to end all forms of violence against women and girls, and by the organisation’s growing work on TFGBV with partners and movements across its focus countries: Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nepal, Uganda and Zimbabwe. The purpose of the report is not only to describe TFGBV, but to identify patterns, generate important insights for advocacy, and deliver actionable recommendations that can strengthen partner strategies, inform policymaker engagement, and support coordinated responses ahead of the UN Commission on the Status of Women 70th edition.

The analysis builds on Womankind’s existing learning and aligns with the policy brief Disrupting the Continuum of Violence: Combatting Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence by deepening understanding of how TFGBV operates across intersecting marginalised identities, its consequences and how it disproportionately shapes the lives of women and girls. The report is anchored in a qualitative approach designed to document evolving TFGBV harms and map gaps in TFGBV responses across Womankind’s and its partners’ focus contexts, prioritising the lived and advocacy perspectives of those most exposed to these harms.

TFGBV comprises multiple forms of violence and can be categorised according to the:

I. Behaviour of the perpetrator (e.g. cyberflashing),

II. Tactics used to commit the abuse (image-based abuse),

III. Nature of the relationship between the survivor and the perpetrator, and IV.Technology used (social media, Artificial Intelligence (AI) (UNFPA, 2024))

TFGBV can occur as isolated incidents, repeatedly over time, across geographical borders, or concurrently with other experiences of GBV and TFGBV. The table below is a nonexhaustive list of some forms of TFGBV.

Examples and forms of TFGBV

Category of TFGBV

Online Harassment and Abuse

Sexual harassment: Unwanted sexual advances, requests for sexual favours, sexually explicit messages

Gender-based hate speech: Misogynistic slurs, threats based on gender identity/expression

Stalking/cyberstalking: Persistent unwanted contact, monitoring across platforms

Doxxing: Publishing private information (address, phone, workplace) with malicious intent

Impersonation/catfishing: Creating fake profiles to damage reputation or relationships

Threatening messages: Death threats, rape threats, threats of physical violence

Body shaming and appearance-based harassment

Reproductive coercion: Threats or pressure regarding pregnancy/ abortion decisions online

Outing: Revealing someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity without consent

Sexual Exploitation and Coercion

Financial exploitation: Romance scams, financial abuse through digital banking control

Grooming: Adults building trust with minors for exploitation

Human trafficking: Using social media/dating apps for trafficking

Coerced sexting: Pressuring for intimate images/videos

Digital prostitution rings: Forced online sex work

Livestreamed abuse: Forcing victims to perform acts on camera

Romance scams

Image-based & Synthetic MediaAbuse

Non-consensual Intimate Image Sharing (NCII): Sharing intimate images without consent, screenshotting and sharing intimate video calls, Cyberflashing

Upskirting/downblousing/voyeuristic content: Non-consensual intimate photography, Hidden camera recordings, bathroom/ changing room videos

Sextortion: Blackmail using intimate images

Child sexual abuse material (CSAM)

Trading/selling intimate images: “Collector culture” of NCII

Symbolic & Representational Violence

Coordinated

Attacks and Platform

Manipulation

Privacy & Surveillance

Dogpiling/brigading: Coordinated mass harassment campaigns

Raid organising: Using forums/channels to coordinate attacks

Hashtag hijacking: Coordinating to flood feminist/women’s hashtags with abuse

Review bombing: Coordinated negative reviews targeting womenowned businesses

Mass reporting campaigns: Coordinated false reporting to get accounts suspended

Networked harassment: Cross-platform coordinated abuse campaigns

Doxxing: Publishing private information (address, phone, workplace) with malicious intent

Spyware/stalker ware: Installing monitoring software on devices

GPS tracking: Unauthorised location monitoring through apps/devices

Password stealing/sharing: Accessing accounts without permission

Smart home device abuse: Using IoT devices for monitoring/control

Workplace surveillance: Inappropriate monitoring of female employees

Browser history tracking: Monitoring online activity

AI partner/chatbot abuse: Using AI to simulate and normalise violence against women

Misogynistic meme creation/sharing: Degrading representations of women

Gendered disinformation: False narratives about feminists, women leaders

Incel content: Ideological content promoting hatred of women

This report centres girls and women in their diversities and examines TFGBV as part of a continuum of violence that restricts safety, voice, and participation. Recognising TFGBV as gendered is crucial because it shows how technology is weaponised to exploit the inequalities tied to gender and sexuality. Framing TFGBV this way keeps the analysis centred on girls and women in all their diversities, while also capturing harms experienced by people of other genders, particularly LBTIQ+ and non-binary people, who are frequently targeted through sexualised abuse, outing threats, and identitybased harassment.

One such example is sextortion, and other forms of image-based abuse rely on the threat of public exposure to enforce compliance. This coercion can be especially acute for girls and young women, including LBTIQ+ and trans or non-binary people, where perpetrators exploit the risk of stigma, family or community backlash, and the fear of being outed. These dynamics can prevent survivors from seeking adult support or formal reporting, increasing isolation and escalating harm (IWF, 2025; Coles, 2024).

Continuum of Violence

We also emphasise that TFGBV does not occur in isolation but operates as part of a continuum that connects online violence to offline harms. The concept was first articulated by Powell & Henry (2016) in their study of sexual violence against women in online spaces, where they established that forms of online abuse often escalated or occurred alongside offline abuse, is driven by the same gender-based power dynamics and had the same impacts on victims.5

Later studies have reinforced this1 perspective, highlighting how TFGBV is often a precursor to offline physical violence, including femicide (Kadurira & Womankind Worldwide, 2024) A 2021 study in the Arab States found that 44% of women who experienced TFGBV reported that the incident moved offline (UN Women, 2021). In another study, one in five women journalists reported that they were attacked offline in connection with online attacks (UN Women, 2022).

People who have experienced offline violence are also at higher risk of TFGBV. In Ethiopia, this fact is made glaring by the data showing that children who had experienced sexual violence in person are ten times more likely to experience online sexual exploitation and abuse (UNICEF Office of ResearchInnocenti, 2022).

Intersectionality

In this study, we will also take the stance that while TFGBV has an impact on all survivors, survivors with multiple intersecting identities experience more frequent and severe forms of TFGBV. For this reason, we use intersectionality as one of the conceptual frameworks anchoring our study of TFGBV. Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality describes how overlapping and intersecting identities shape people’s lives and experiences (Crenshaw, 1991). Applied to TFGBV, this perspective frames how factors such as race, class, sexuality, gender identity, age and disability status impact the intensity and frequency of attacks.

The Intersection of Sexuality, Gender Identity, and Violence

Sexuality and gender identity serve as additional factors that heighten TFGBV attacks. In fact, one study puts it that transgender and gender-diverse people experience the highest proportions of TFGBV. While global datasets are lacking, regional datasets from the EU and US confirm this, with a study by GLAAD finding that 76% of trans people have experienced TFGBV in their lifetime (GLAAD, 2023; Reuters, 2024). This fact is compounded by the fact that in many countries, queerness is criminalized. As a result, abusers act out of the confidence that LBTIQ+ targets will often not fight back, as it exposes them to more harm both online and offline. LBTIQ+ people also prefer to selfcensor online to reduce the risk of targeted TFGBV attacks, with a study in Kenya finding that LBTIQ+ women rely on masking strategies such as the use of anonymous profiles and locked accounts to feel safe enough to express themselves freely (INEND, 2023).

Gender Disparities in TFGBV

women of colour (Black, Asian, Latinx, and mixed-race women) were 34% more likely to experience TFGBV more hostile than what white women experienced. 76% of trans people have experienced TFGBV in their lifetime

A study in 3 Kenyan universities found that 64% of the female respondents had experienced TFGBV as compared to 35% of male respondents

Women and girls experience TFGBV at substantially higher rates than men. In Zimbabwe, Gender and Media Connect (GMC), an organization that is part of the Women’s Coalition in Zimbabwe, found that 60% of female journalists experienced TFGBV in 2024. In Europe, female members of parliament experienced 80% more attacks than their male counterparts (Matlach & Drath, 2024). Similarly, a study in the United States found that 25 female members of Congress had NCII of them featured on deepfake websites, compared to only one male congress member (Rodriguez & Mithani, 2024). The situation is similar in learning institutions, as a study in 3 Kenyan universities found that 64% of the female respondents had experienced TFGBV as compared to 35% of male respondents (CCGD, University of Nairobi WEE Hub & UNFPA, 2023).

Race also plays into the differences in intensity, frequency and severity of attacks, as evidenced in Amnesty International’s 2018 study that found that women of colour (Black, Asian, Latinx, and mixed-race women) were 34% more likely to experience TFGBV more hostile than what white women experienced. The same study highlighted disproportionate intra-group differences as within the same group of women of colour, Black women were 84% more likely to be targeted in TFGBV attacks compared to white women (Amnesty International, 2018).

Underexplored Intersections: Disability, Rurality, and Religion

Although it is widely understood that disability amplifies TFGBV (UNFPA, 2024), the quantitative data demonstrating the extent of this severity remains limited (Hameed et al, 2025). Yet qualitative data highlight that TFGBV intensifies violence against disabled people, as survivors often lack autonomy over their digital devices, depend on intermediaries for communication and encounter exclusion from legal systems (Harris & Woodlock, 2021).

Similarly, greater attention is needed to explore variations in the severity of TFGBV attacks across other identities, including rural and religious women. A study of Muslim Women Human Rights Defenders (HRDs) in East Africa illustrates how violence operates at the nexus of gender and religion. Respondents reported avoiding talking about gender and religion online because of the possibility of being harmed online and offline by men, the state, and religious extremist groups (Yahaya & Iyer, 2022).

In Afghanistan, as the Taliban took over in 2021, Afghan women started self-censoring in online spaces, while those who maintained an online presence chose to do so under anonymous and/or restricted accounts (Afghan Witness, 2024a). As they are self-censored, the Afghan digital space morphed from being a space for women’s expression as online hate and abuse against politically active Afghan women increased by 217% during this period (Afghan Witness, 2024a; Associated Press, 2023). The goal of the Taliban seemed to be to shrink the online space for Afghan women, just as they had shrunk offline participation for them. Aside from facing a chilling effect in online spaces, religious women are also victims of technology when used as a tool of gendered discipline by men and institutions that want them in check.

In India, fuelled by sectarian hate, perpetrators uploaded the pictures of hundreds of vocal Muslim women activists on platforms like GitHub, referred to them with slurs such as ‘Bulli Bai’ and ‘Sulli’ and ‘auctioned’ them, exposing them to harassment, NCII, sexual harassment and doxxing (Al Jazeera, 2022; Jaswal, 2022). Their goal was to rein these women in and prevent them from challenging right-wing Hindu influencers. In a similar show of the use of technology for gendered discipline, authorities in Iran shifted from street-level morality patrols to AI-assisted surveillance, deploying facial recognition and app-based reporting to enforce hijab laws (Strzyżyńska, 2022).

Religious women also face particularly heightened exposure to NCII as their vulnerability is compounded by intersecting stigmas. Perpetrators exploit the dual stigma of their sexuality and their participation in sexual activity to blackmail and financially extort them.

Living in a rural area is a compounding factor for TFGBV, as the experience of women in rural areas in the Global South is shaped by structural neglect of the education and justice sectors and the lack of connectivity.

A study by Every Child Protected Against Trafficking (ECPAT) found that in Eastern and Southern Africa, girls in rural areas were less likely to recognize TFGBV harms such as sextortion and grooming because of low digital literacy (ECPAT International, 2025). In addition, low digital literacy reduces the ability of women in Sub-Saharan Africa to activate digital safety tools such as reporting mechanisms of privacy settings (GSMA, 2023).

In Nepal, Dalit women are an example of women whose experience with TFGBV is compounded by the fact that they make up the lowest caste in Nepalese society, most of them have low literacy and live in poverty in rural areas. Dalit women are increasingly targets of NCII, online harassment in the form of sexualised and demeaning content and caste-ist abuse and slurs, and digital surveillance that restricts their ability to exist freely online. AI-generated deepfakes are also a form of TFGBV increasingly used against this group of women (Digital Rights Nepal, 2025). However, access to justice is challenging as Dalit women are systemically marginalized, and their low literacy means that sometimes they cannot accurately articulate the harms occurring to them and the impact they inflict.

Broken justice systems deepen rural women’s vulnerability. In Nepal, the justice system still has not defined TFGBV and prioritises looking at financial online harms over gendered harms, meaning that complex forms of TFGBV affecting Dalit women can still not be adequately addressed through legal routes (Digital Rights Nepal, 2025). In Kenya and Ethiopia, survivors living in rural areas experience this challenge too, as they meet blockers such as the high cost of access to justice, long distances to police stations and the lack of survivor-centred training for police officers. Altogether, these challenges converge and render rural women invisible in conversations about ending TFGBV while also heightening their vulnerability towards TFGBV.

Targeting

Women

in Public and Private Life

TFGBV particularly intensified against women in public life, such as journalists, activists, and politicians, as digital platforms became the primary spaces for interactions due to restrictive lockdown policies. In this period, women journalists were systematically targeted across 125 countries, with 75% of them experiencing TFGBV that was mostly coordinated and networked (ICFJ & UNESCO, 2020). In private life, as Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) intensified, so did TFGBV, further demonstrating that online violence is a continuum of violence in physical spaces. In one example in Palestine, women referred to this phenomenon as a ‘surveillance tower’, describing the familial and social surveillance monitoring their online activities and interactions (Ben Cheikh, 2020).

TFGBV Trends and Patterns Over the Years

2020 - 2021

A Shadow Pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, as more people adapted to the use of digital platforms due to physical restrictions, there was an increase in Gender Based Violence (GBV) cases. This surge was so pronounced that the UN Women referred to it as the ‘shadow pandemic’7. Similarly, rates of TFGBV increased, with studies such as Plan International’s reporting that 58% of girls worldwide had experienced TFGBV during this period. The Australian e-Safety Commission documented a 50% increase in TFGBV in March 2020 (UN Women, 2020). Cybercrimes centres and national domestic violence help centres also saw an uptick in calls from survivors. The scale of the problem varied by region but remained consistently troubling. In Nepal, Action Aid found that 34.5% of women and girls between the ages of 15 and 30 experienced TFGBV during the lockdown period (Tiwari & Shrestha, 2020). In Lebanon, on the other hand, the Internal Security Forces Directorate reported that 41% of cybercrimes reported to them were against women and girls between the ages of 12 and 26 (APC, 2020).

Content Moderation Challenges

The surge in TFGBV coincided with a crisis in content moderation. An increase in the use of digital platforms brought about an unprecedented deluge of online content that platforms needed to manage. At this time, a lot of content moderators, like most non-essential workers, had to work from home (Mnemonic, 2020). It became uncomfortable for moderators who had to review harmful content in the presence of family members who were also confined in the same spaces (Mnemonic, 2020).

In a bid to reduce the burden on content moderators but also meet regulatory and business compliance, platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter (now known as X) decided to rely on automated content moderation driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI) models. Yet, the impact was not all positive. In the Global South, as wrongful content removal rates went up, TFGBV remained unaddressed because of the limited language coverage in automated content moderation systems and their lack of understanding of nuance when abusers used coded speech to pass their message across.

Platform Responses and Industry Commitments

With the statistics becoming increasingly glaring and evidence pointing to inaction by technology platforms, these companies started coming up with solutions to curb TFGBV. Facebook, which UNESCO had identified as the worst-performing platform in dealing with TFGBV against journalists, responded through several efforts. (ICJ & UNESCO, 2020). For instance, after receiving complaints of doxxing from women in India, they launched a feature that allowed users to quickly lock their profile in times of heightened scrutiny and prevent abusers from viewing their posts or photos (Singh, 2020). They also launched a partnership with StopNCII, an organisation supporting survivors of imagebased abuse, and created a safety hub with resources in 12 Indian languages (YourStory, 2021). In late 2021, Meta launched another partnership with StopNCII that was rolled out globally, allowing users to pre-emptively prevent their intimate images from circulating. The tool allows users to hand their images to StopNCII, and a unique hash value is assigned to the image, creating a digital fingerprint that allows platforms to automatically detect it when the same image is uploaded online and remove it (Meta, 2021).

Aside from Meta, there were industry commitments made by peer companies to curb TFGBV. At the 2021 UN Generation Equality Forum in Paris, Facebook (now known as Meta), Google, TikTok and Twitter (now known as X) committed to building better ways for women to curate their safety online (Web Foundation, 2021). They promised to offer easy and accessible navigation to safety tools, reduce the burden on women by proactively detecting more abuse, offer users the ability to track outcomes of reports they made, and increase their capacity to understand context and nuance when moderating content (Web Foundation, 2021)

2022 - 2023

Global and Multilateral Initiatives

Between 2022 and 2023, there were many multilateral initiatives set up to coordinate national responses to TFGBV. In March 2022, the Global Partnership for Action on GenderBased Online Harassment and Abuse was launched at CSW66 (UN Women, 2023). The partnership expanded to 15 countries within its first year and created a collaborative platform for governments, survivors, civil society, researchers, and the private sector to align on survivor-centred principles for TFGBV prevention, response, and data collection.

Platform Regulation

Later that year, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) adopted Resolution 522 on the Protection of Women Against Digital Violence in Africa, the first continental recognition of TFGBV as a human rights violation. This resolution expanded the interpretation of the African Charter and the Maputo Protocol to explicitly cover forms of TFGBV such as cyberstalking, doxxing, non-consensual image sharing (NCII), and misogynistic disinformation (ACHPR, 2022).

It also encouraged African nations to harmonize national laws with a gendersensitive digital rights framework, reframing TFGBV from a “cybercrime” issue into a matter of human rights obligations (Dube, 2024).

In March 2023, CSW67 reinforced this global momentum by formally acknowledging TFGBV as a barrier to gender equality. Its agreed conclusions emphasized survivorcentred approaches, access to justice, accountability, and coherence across national and international responses (UN Women, 2023). In Latin America, the Follow-up Mechanism to the Belém do Pará Convention (MESECVI), in partnership with Equality Now, advanced work on a model law on TFGBV, designed to integrate TFGBV prevention, survivor protection, and platform accountability into national legal frameworks (Equality Now, 2023).

During this period, discussions around platform regulation brought TFGBV to the fore as an area that required government attention. As a response, the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) entered into force in November 2022 and imposed systemic risk assessments, transparency obligations, and explicit attention to gender-based digital harms. The EU Directive on Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (2023) complemented this by requiring member states to criminalize NCII, cyberstalking, and online harassment, including deepfakes.

Other jurisdictions followed. The UK’s Online Safety Act (2023) imposed a statutory duty of care on platforms to remove harmful content quickly and empower users with tools like identity verification. Singapore revised its Online Safety Act and adopted the Online Criminal Harms Act (2023), granting authorities powers to shut down abusive accounts. In Australia, the 2021 Online Safety Act underwent a 2023 statutory review, focusing on emerging risks from generative AI, recommender systems, and encrypted platforms, while reaffirming its global leadership in online safety regulation.

The Rise of a Global Manosphere

As work was being done to officially address TFGBV at the national and international levels, on platforms like X, TikTok and Facebook, manosphere content was becoming more mainstream globally. Manosphere ideology is defined as “a hateful ideology that is rooted in the belief of the natural and innate superiority of cisgender men and their right to subjugate women, trans men and non-binary people” (SPLC, n.d). Prior to this era, manosphere content such as incel ideology had thrived in niche content platforms and messaging boards like 4chan and Reddit. In 2022, manosphere influencer Andrew Tate rose to fame rapidly and quickly became the face of online misogyny and toxic masculinity (Internet Matters, 2023).

Despite the alarm at his seemingly sudden popularity amongst young boys worldwide, this reaction belied the reality that in the Global South, manosphere content had been thriving on open platforms such as X and Facebook for years without proper moderation.

In Kenya, for instance, for over 5 years, popular manosphere influencer Eric Amunga ran a weekly hashtag campaign known as #MasculinitySaturdays where he shared misogynistic and stereotypical views about women, vilified feminists, and spread harmful health misinformation to over 1.9 million followers (Blomfield 2024). As a result, as Andrew Tate got banned from platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube, manosphere influencers worldwide took it upon themselves to repackage his messages and spread them to their audiences (Sung, 2022). This led to a new trend where manosphere networks globally seem to be united under shared ideologies of reducing the impact of feminist activist work, such as #MeToo, that reigned in the 2010s.

Despite the progress made by multilateral initiatives and technology companies in addressing TFGBV, 2023 to 2025 largely represent a regressive period in the protection of women’s and gender-diverse persons’ rights in online spaces. While technology companies made commitments to tackling TFGBV, this period has seen the emergence of new and more aggravated forms of TFGBV as a result of rapid technology development.

Safety-by-Design

The rolling back of diversity and inclusion has also extended into product development, as new technology releases increasingly forego the unique safety needs of women and genderdiverse people. Safety-byDesign recommends that technology companies minimise online threats by anticipating harms before they occur, and prioritising inclusivity by focusing on the users most at-risk (WEF, 2025). Yet, in more recent years, companies have dialled back on efforts to fix vulnerabilities that put women at risk.

The Erosion of Content Moderation

The rise of misogyny and the rolling back of diversity and inclusion measures in the Trump era has seeped into the technology space and influenced decisions to reduce content moderation efforts globally. For instance, in January 2025, Meta, the parent company that owns Facebook and Instagram, removed its restrictions on dehumanising speech against gender categories, giving allowance for users to make allegations of mental illness or abnormality against people based on their gender or sexual orientation (Conger, 2025). X (formerly known as Twitter), on the other hand, recorded a 50% increase in hate speech after Elon Musk made decisions to reduce the content moderation workforce (Hickey et al, 2025). The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) found that during key periods in 2022, there was a 69% spike in new accounts created (~7900 per day) for the purpose of following misogynistic and abusive accounts (ISD, 2023).

Poor content moderation is also a mainstay for TikTok, with research showing that women and LBTIQ+ people are disproportionately attacked on the platform. In Ethiopia, severe threats of violence against LBTIQ+ people and content exposing their private details often stay up on TikTok unmoderated because of the platform’s inability to moderate the country’s languages (Anna, 2023). Moreover, a 2024 study of Hungarian, German and French TikTok comments revealed that female European Members of Parliament (MPs) received 80% more TFGBV attacks in their comments section than their male counterparts (Matlach & Drath, 2024).

Networked TFGBV remains persistent, with Telegram serving as the preferred platform for large groups of thousands of men coalescing around TFGBV acts like image-based abuse and sexual violence (Tode Jimenez, 2025; Martin, 2025).

Recent security breaches highlight this trend. Tea, a women-only application where users exchanged dating tips, experienced a security breach that showed that the company did not safeguard data collected for security verification, such as identity cards and pictures, exposing over 70000 women to the possibility of being harmed both online and offline (Maiburg & Cox, 2025). Period apps like Flo, which offer fertility and menstrual cycle tracking for women and gender-diverse people, have also compromised user safety as they have been found to have prioritised commercial interests by sharing sensitive data with advertisers and technology companies (FTC, 2021; FTC, 2023).

Similarly, Meta’s Ray Ban glasses were found to have a security vulnerability that allowed two students at Harvard to integrate facial recognition technology into the glasses, allowing them to identify anyone using information online (Cox, 2024). While the students conducted it as an experiment, it was a clear demonstration of a privacy and security vulnerability that could be disproportionately used to target women and gender-diverse people. Additionally, the discrete and inconspicuous design of the Meta RayBan Glasses has proven to be an affordance that facilitates TFGBV. Since these devices look like regular eyeglasses, victims are rarely able to tell that they are being recorded.

As a result, people are increasingly recording women without their knowledge or consent in places and situations where privacy is expected, such as during sexual encounters or intimate services such as waxing. For example, a Russian tourist travelling through Kenya and Ghana used Meta Glasses to film himself approaching and asking women for their contacts and later filmed them while these women were in private settings with him. He then posted the videos of these encounters online as a show of conquest, a practice that is being done by pick-up artists globally, inviting harassment, shame and ridicule to the women who may have consented to a sexual encounter, but did not expect to be filmed and shamed online (Tanno & Scattola, 2026).

Generative AI

Lastly, the entrance of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) into the technology space has amplified the possibilities of creating, disseminating and performing TFGBV, and its impacts are already being reported by women worldwide. Gen AI is a technology that generates content (text, image, video or audio) in response to requests given by a user (UNESCO, 2023). This type of technology works by producing ‘new content’ by analysing and learning from the large amounts of data that it is trained on (UNESCO, 2023). The most popular Gen AI tool is ChatGPT, followed closely by Gemini and Claude. Prior to Gen AI, technology was already found to amplify the impacts of TFGBV due to factors such as anonymity, the ability to perpetrate abuse at a distance, affordability, and automation and rapid propagation capabilities (Fascendini & Fialová, 2011). Gen AI supercharges these characteristics at an exponential rate by offering sophisticated attack methods to non-technical audiences.

Since late 2022, the popularity of Gen AI has increased the ease of performing TFGBV, helped reinvent new forms of abuse, and led to the intensification of TFGBV attacks on women worldwide. For instance, while deepfake technology was already being used to make non-consensual intimate images (NCII) of women, it required a degree of technical skill that limited its democratisation (Maddocks, 2020). With Gen AI, nudify apps, applications that generate nude images of women from clothed pictures of them, have proliferated the internet and made it much easier for people without technical skills to generate fabricated NCII (Gibson et all, 2024).

Gen AI has also expanded the capabilities of people to commit targeted harassment. As Gen AI models can generate text that is indistinguishable from human text, women have reported that their intimate partners are using ChatGPT to aid them in generating coercive scripts (Griffiths, 2025; Wu, 2024). The ability to automate text that seems human-generated has also benefited actors interested in spreading gendered disinformation. In addition, Gen AI tools like Midjourney and Gemini have enabled the creation of hyper-realistic avatars, which have introduced new modalities for TFGBV.

A notable case emerged in 2025, where users created a network of Down syndrome Instagram AI influencers which redirected viewers to adult content (Maiberg, 2025). The perpetrators stole content from real influencers and altered their faces to appear as though they had Down syndrome. They then exploited the fetishization of disability to direct audiences toward explicit AIgenerated pornography that degraded women with Down syndrome. In another case in Ethiopia, TikTok failed to remove AIgenerated content created in the likeness of Heaven, a 7-year-old minor who was sexually abused and killed in an act of femicide (Chala, 2024).

Economic Impact of TFGBV

While TFGBV’s psychological and social impacts are well documented, there is a dearth of research quantifying its economic impacts. It is already difficult to measure TFGBV with so many factors hindering the standardisation of TFGBV studies. Some of these include the rapid evolution of TFGBV, crossjurisdictional complexities, age restrictions on studying this form of abuse in people under 15, and the difference in severity of different forms of TFGBV (University of Melbourne & UNFPA, 2023). Yet, through anecdotal experiences and varied statistics, it is clear that TFGBV has direct and indirect impacts on women’s economic participation.

For instance, it is estimated that in the European Union (EU) alone, €49 - 89 billion is lost annually because of TFGBV (EPRS, 2021). This number is the monetised value of the loss in quality of life for victims, the reduction of productivity and participation in the economy, the lost tax revenue and healthcare and legal costs accumulated when dealing with the impacts of TGBV (EPRS, 2021).

A 2022 study with women journalists who were victims of TFGBV corroborates this, as 11% reported missing work while 38% chose to retreat from being visible in online spaces. A further 4% quit their jobs, while 2% decided to leave the profession altogether (ICFJ, 2022). Women in public life, such as influencers, journalists, politicians and activists, particularly face this challenge as visibility in online spaces is central to their careers. Withdrawing from social media and clearing their digital footprints has a direct impact on their earning potential. Furthermore, these women also lose out on opportunities as employers often shun women who have experienced TFGBV publicly.

In Kenya, LBTIQ+ people often have to pay more to live in secure neighbourhoods or sometimes even leave the country for periods, to ensure that online attackers do not act on their threats of violence (KICTANET, 2023). Finally, TFGBV causes reputational harm to survivors. NCII is often difficult to scrub from the internet, especially when it occurs on encrypted messaging platforms like Telegram

Platforms like Telegram have also become hosts to bots that generate NCII at the click of a button, with reports estimating that in 2024, these bots had close to 4 million monthly users (Caramela, 2024). In Kenya and Nigeria, X users frequently use Grok, the platform’s in-built AI chatbot, to fabricate NCII of unsuspecting women (Newcombe, 2025). While Grok does not comply with explicit requests for full nude images, the bot is often able to toe the line of existing safeguards, perform acts like fabricating images with the subjects exposed more or with private body parts such as the breasts being enlarged, and ultimately, still produce images that would be considered as NCII.

Part II: Interview Findings

Methodology

This study employed a qualitative, multi-country design to explore emerging patterns of technologyfacilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) and its impacts on feminist activism, queer organising, and civil society programming. The research sought to document evolving forms of TFGBV harms, map ecosystemlevel drivers, and identify gaps in platform and legal responses across Womankind Worldwide’s focus countries. Given the high-risk nature of TFGBV in Global South contexts, particularly where anti-LBTIQ+ legal and political environments shape the terrain of online and offline violence, the research prioritised the lived and advocacy perspectives of those most exposed to these harms.

To get an ideal group of respondents, the study employed purposive sampling, where we selected respondents with expertise in TFGBV or ones who had experienced TFGBV. We combined the approach with snowball sampling to further identify more respondents to take part in the study. Recruitment for respondents targeted:

Public-Facing Women

(activists, journalists, politicians, creators, social media managers, athletes, gamers)

Service/Support Providers

(NGO staff, GBV organisations, legal support, digital security specialists)

Women & Girls with Lived Experience

Findings

(diverse identities: disabilities, indigenous, LBTIQ+, migrants, conflict-affected, grassroots, etc.)

Policy/Ecosystem Experts (researchers, advocates, policy managers, platform professionals)

Content creators/ Influencers/HR Activists/Journalists (high-visibility professionals)

In the interviews conducted, clear patterns emerged showing how TFGBV is a structured form of violence operating across a continuum that links digital attacks to real-world harm. The interviews point to a shifting landscape of technologyfacilitated harm affecting feminist activism, queer organising, and NGO work. This section synthesises these findings and maps out where harm is concentrated, how it is enacted, what enables it to persist, and the impacts it produces for individuals, organisations, and movements, alongside the adaptive strategies communities are adopting in response.

Data Collection

The interviews for the study were conducted remotely and followed a semi-structured interview guide covering:

I. Prevalent and emerging TFGBV forms;

II. Platform-specific risk environments;

III. Links between online harm and offline violence;

IV. Reporting experiences with technology companies; and

V. Experiences with legal and institutional response pathways.

As a supplement to the interviews, a dedicated Womankind staff Focus Group Discussion (FGD) was conducted to map organisational learning around TFGBV.

Ethics and Safeguarding

Given the sensitivity of TFGBV experiences, particularly for LBTIQ+ participants, this study adopted a harm-minimisation approach. Participants were informed about the interview purpose, anticipated risks, and the confidentiality measures in place. In the case where quotes were considered for attribution, the researchers indicated that participants would be asked for consent to use direct quotes without identifiers.

To support participant well-being, wellness and psychosocial support were made available to interviewees through a partner organization, in case discussions triggered distress, reflecting the study’s commitment to survivor-centred research practice. All identifying information was handled carefully to avoid increasing privacy and security risks for respondents and organisations working in hostile political or social environments.

Findings

In the interviews conducted, clear patterns emerged showing how TFGBV is a structured form of violence operating across a continuum that links digital attacks to real-world harm. The interviews point to a shifting landscape of technology-facilitated harm affecting feminist activism, queer organising, and NGO work. This section synthesises these findings and maps out where harm is concentrated, how it is enacted, what enables it to persist, and the impacts it produces for individuals, organisations, and movements, alongside the adaptive strategies communities are adopting in response.

Platform Dynamics

1. Video and Photo-based Platforms as Sites for Increased TFGBV

Video and photo-based platforms such as Instagram Reels, TikTok and Facebook Reels are exposing women and genderdiverse people to disproportionate harm because these platforms require people to speak on camera. While the shift to video has benefitted feminist movement building and enabled them to reach more audiences because of accessibility and the algorithmic amplification of video formats, there are just as many downsides to this. As organizers have embraced video-first platforms and regularly get on video to speak about various issues, they are subject to harassment in the comment sections and DMs about their looks, the topics they speak about and even how they present themselves. One interviewee spoke about how a male colleague received a deluge of comments questioning his masculinity and implying that, as he was working on women’s issues, he must be gay.

In more extreme cases, being identifiable on camera has put feminist and queer rights’ organizers at risk of being outed, doxxed and physically harmed. In Ethiopia, there have been multiple cases of activists being identified, doxxed and physically assaulted, with trends starting from TikTok and Facebook. One such activist even had to flee the country (Getachew, 2025). Accessibility to one’s image has also enabled perpetrators to commit harms such as Image-Based Abuse, where they alter activists’ images with tools like AI. On X, Grok AI, X’s inbuilt multi-modal AI chatbot, is often used by male users to “dress” women in revealing clothing and “undress” women in modest clothing (Maiberg, 2025). These users manipulate their images to suit their ideologies of how women should present themselves in online spaces.

“

When we first started Twitter, we were doing what every organization on Twitter does when you have meetings, you share pictures. So, people were going on our Twitter and downloading pictures of people and outing them. Some of these pictures for these members, probably for them, had been taken in confidence. They did not, for a moment, even fathom that this could happen, because I remember some of the people that were so much affected, one, included someone that ended up running for asylum.”

~Interview Respondent

Rather, we use other cartoons or other mechanisms to present our ideas. We are not going to use individuals, especially women and young girls in our social media, because we want to keep them safe as long as we can. So, this is our strategy. “

~Interview Respondent

2. Dating Applications as an Emerging Frontier of TFGBV Harm

When TFGBV is highlighted, dating apps rarely take the spotlight. From our research, however, dating apps are increasingly being used to target women and queer people. In countries like Ghana, Nigeria and Uganda, dating apps like Grindr and Bumble are sites where perpetrators, who are often police officers, pretend and entrap queer people, physically and sexually assault them, out them to their communities and sextort them. As queer people have retreated from these sites due to the heightened risk of physical violence, they have turned to closed platforms like WhatsApp, where perpetrators are also targeting them. Women are also increasingly being targeted on dating apps for romantic fraud and sextortion.

“

“

We have had scenarios in our community where the police are using that app called Grindr... infiltrating it, seducing gay boys from it, drawing them to their physical space... You reach there, and someone gets physically violated. They get beaten up or arrested.”

~Interviewee

There would be situations where people are targeted in the group chat when they go and start talking to someone in their direct DMs, maybe they’ll send an intimate image or something, or the person will try to get them to meet them in person, then either they’ll be kidnapped, then forced to strip. This person will film them and send those images to their contacts and ask for a ransom.”

~Interviewee

3. Encrypted Platforms as a Persistent Site for TFGBV Violations

Encrypted platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram continue to be a double-edged sword for feminist and LBTIQ+ rights activists. On one hand, these platforms offer secure and intimate spaces for organizing and community building that have disappeared from open social media platforms. On Telegram, anonymity allows these activists to operate in a safe manner. However, TFGBV continues to persist on these platforms. Telegram and WhatsApp have been identified as sites where coordination of harassment attacks and doxxing is planned, and more prevalently, where doctored and real intimate images of unsuspecting women are shared. These platforms were also identified to be sites for CSAM circulation, with detection being hard because of their encrypted nature.

TFGBV Tactics and Mechanisms

1. Coordinated Harassment is A Growing Threat

Telegram that now a number of perpetrators are shifting to the use of Telegram for nonconsensual intimate image sharing. Also, the anonymity that is provided by these digital platforms is now accompanied by AI, which creates room for the perpetrator to go unidentified.”

~Interview Respondent

As perpetrators know that people use WhatsApp to connect and keep up with their social and familial circles, they have capitalised on it as a space for inflicting violence. Interviewees noted cases where perpetrators shared nonconsensual intimate images (NCII) of women on WhatsApp in a bid to punish them for acts such as failing to pay them or trying to end intimate relationships. Perpetrators also use WhatsApp to out queer individuals, as their family members are likely to receive this information.

We were talking directly to people who’ve experienced different cases of online hate and violence. There was one person. Someone had a nude image of a partner and posted it on a WhatsApp story and then started threatening them and saying, ‘If you don’t pay me this much, I’m going to post the pictures on Facebook now’”

~Interviewee

Brigading, the practice of coordinating or participating in a campaign to harass a group or individual, is an ongoing threat to women’s existence in online spaces and feminist and queer rights’ organizing. While coordinated harassment has been a persistent issue, in the past few years, it has become a precursor to violence in physical spaces. Not only are vocal or visible women attacked, but now even people who show support to them are targeted too. For instance, masses that harass vocal women and feminist and queer activists also monitor their accounts and target anyone who likes or comments on their posts. Activists now not only have to keep themselves safe online but also have to think of their extended community too.

“ “ “ “

We had situations where, like one lady, she was a sex worker, and I guess her partner didn’t like that she does that kind of work. She was also experiencing intimate partner violence in person, offline, with this person. They’d also filmed them having sex without her consent. When she tried to leave, he was threatening to post these things online. He sent some to their mutual friends. He sent it on WhatsApp, but now he is threatening to post them on social media if she leaves him.”

~Interview Respondent

The people threatened us. And, you know, people were selecting members, or selecting who likes the comment, and sending them inbox messages, even trying to get their locations and their home addresses to attack them. We decided to just break from the internet, because we were not even prepared for that harm.”

~Interviewee

While some of this brigading is organic and as a result of growing hostility towards feminist and LBTIQ+ rights activism, it is also often state or NGO funded and coordinated. This type of coordinated violence is often spearheaded by social media personalities with large followings, such as bloggers and influencers. These types of public personalities are able to garner large support from people who oppose feminist values, and coordinate them to attack, doxx and out women and LBTIQ+ people. Coordinated harassment easily escalates into physical attacks and violence. Large groups of people online are able to piece together important information that is enough to doxx someone and coordinate attacks in the physical places they are in.

In Ethiopia, for example, there have been extreme cases of brigading against feminist and LBTIQ+ rights activists. In August 2023, as the country’s security officials launched a crackdown on establishments that they perceived to be sites for ‘gay sexual activity’, this homophobia was mirrored in online spaces such as TikTok (Reuters, 2023). On TikTok, masses doxxed and outed people, calling on other people to find these individuals and physically attack them. Feminist activists have also borne the brunt of brigading, with users online attacking them, as they believe that feminism is incompatible with Ethiopia’s traditions and cultures. Interviewees noted that they are retreating more from online spaces due to this backlash.

~Interview Respondent “

There was this particular time... people would make accounts on TikTok, and then they would take random pictures of people that they suspect are gay... ‘Oh, these are the gays in Addis’... One of the people who is actually queer was doxxed... he was beaten by his classmates. He had to flee to Kenya.”

In Ethiopia, there was a time when there was so much Anti LGBT hate. People would make accounts on TikTok and then take random pictures of people that they suspect are gay. Maybe they have colored hair, maybe some piercings like me, then they say, “Oh, these are the gays in Addis.” You’d see the comments on people saying things like, ‘Oh, we should kill these people, or their government should do something about this.’ One of the people who is actually queer was doxxed, and because he was doxxed, he was beaten by his classmates.”

~Interview Respondent

Factors Intensifying and Enabling TFGBV

1. Low-Income Populations as Targets for TFGBV

Another trend that was identified is the systematic targeting of low-income women with TFGBV attacks. Examples were offered of low-income women being targets of Non-Consensual Intimate Image Sharing (NCII), with cases from low-income areas such as Kibra in Kenya being given. In these contexts, women are trading intimate images in exchange for money for sustenance. The images are then used by perpetrators to blackmail, coerce and sextort them. Sextortion refers to the practice of extorting money or sexual favours from someone by threatening to reveal evidence of their sexual activity. In such cases, survivors’ low-income status, coupled with intersecting factors such as religion, marital status, and age, prevents them from seeking any kind of support or redress from their perpetrators. These intersecting factors also compound the shame. Older women, religious women, and married women, for instance, have to maintain a level of respectability in their society, hence the fear of ostracization and stigmatization discourages them from speaking up or seeking justice.

“Most of them were in the Nubian community... for some reason, it (NCII) was happening to these women, and it was worse because of their Islamic background. So, I had most of them solve these issues as a family, because if your nudes have been leaked and you’re someone’s wife, and your husband is not the one that leaked the nudes, it brings a case of infidelity and they have to sort it out as a family.”

~Interviewee

2. Intersectionality

People existing at the intersections of multiple marginalized identities experience TFGBV disproportionately. Across our interviews, factors such as class, rurality, religion, marital status, age, gender expression and sexuality were identified as TFGBV intensifiers. As aforementioned, women in precarious situations, such as poverty and displacement, and occupations such as sex work, are frequently targeted with TFGBV. There were several instances of NCII being used as a threat by perpetrators to coerce, control and extort such women. Perpetrators are aware that their lack of agency forces them to comply in such situations, rather than seek help and justice.

These precarious situations also mean that women lack access to digital security training. Rural women, for instance, were identified to be extremely vulnerable, as not only do they not have digital security knowledge, but they also lack access to support from organizations that can help them escalate cases relating to TFGBV. Queer people were also identified as a group that was vulnerable to TFGBV simply because of their existence and identity. However, for this group, TFGBV is often a precursor to physical violence, leaving queer people who are more marginalized in extreme vulnerability. Transgender people, for instance, live in fear of their identities being exposed and are in a constant state of hypervigilance in digital and physical spaces.

3. Criminalisation

Criminalisation has been identified as a factor that enables and intensifies TFGBV. In the current political environment, characterised by rising anti-LBTIQ+ messaging and statesponsored violence, LBTIQ+ people and organizations serving and advocating for them face a heightened risk of TFGBV. In countries where LBTIQ+ existence is criminalised, respondents described the systematic use of social media platforms, dating apps, and messaging apps to lure people into physical spaces where they then face violence, exploitation, extortion, arrest, and, in extreme cases, murder. People whose gender expression does not conform to dominant norms are also vulnerable to being outed or accused of being gay in online spaces and consequently attacked in physical locations. Respondents mentioned cases in Cameroon, Ghana, Ethiopia, and Uganda where LBTIQ+ people were identified online and physically accosted and violated, even prompting some to flee to exile.

Somebody else that also faced that backlash was a trans football coach... their face was recognized in public. And they were like, ‘Oh my God, this woman is recruiting [for homosexuality]’ They were being bullied and threatened at the fields when they went to coach and even got attacked in person.”

~Interview Respondent

Criminalisation also restricts access to justice. Survivors often cannot seek support from legal or judicial institutions without risking arrest or further harm because of their sexuality. The situation is further worsened as the organizations that could fill this gap are also being targeted on social media for providing LBTIQ+ services. Abusers capitalize on the moral panic against homosexuality and accuse feminist and women’s rights activists of homosexuality to stoke sustained and targeted harassment campaigns. In one case in Ethiopia, attackers used social media to defame a partner organisation and pressured them to publicly “denounce LBTIQ+ people,” indicating how smear narratives are used to compel distancing, silence, and inflict reputational damage. These accounts demonstrate that criminalisation and anti-LBTIQ+ mobilisation function as risk intensifiers for TFGBV. They raise the likelihood that online targeting will escalate, increase the cost of visibility for activists and organizations, and constrain their response options to non-engagement and retreat.

“ “ “

They don’t ask for anything. They just get you to meet in person, they strip, they film you, and they’ll be saying things like “These are gays that we found in this place.” Then they post them online. So, they usually post them on TikTok and even serialise them into parts, such as part one, part two, part three. They’d also post them on Twitter, but it was mostly on TikTok.”

~Interview Respondent

4. Political and Anti-Right Movements as Drivers of TFGBV

Globally, anti-rights actors are capitalising on the collapse of social contracts and the decline of global economies and directing attention and resources towards steering countries to racist, sexist, capitalist and homophobic values (Narayanaswamy & Hersi, 2025). These actors have increased funding towards mobilisation against human rights, including women and LBTIQ+ persons’ rights. In online spaces, this has manifested as an increase in organic and coordinated TFGBV against women, feminists and LBTIQ+ persons. Speaking about any of these topics, and even more recently simply engaging with posts about these topics, makes people targets towards harassment, abuse, doxxing, hacking attempts and outing.

I handled one case where someone simply responded to a user that was spreading a lot of online hate about queer people. When they responded to this person, they started receiving a lot of hate on Twitter, then a blog actually doxxed their home address online, and they started receiving threats. The people who were DMing them on Twitter found them offline and were threatening to beat them.”

~Interview Respondent

This global backlash can be seen in countries like Ethiopia, where feminist activists have been attacked severely online and offline since 2023, as they are perceived to be against traditional family values. There has also been an increase in transnational political mobilisation for anti-LBTIQ+ laws, resulting in an increase in attacks against queer people and NGOs that provide services to LBTIQ+ people both online and offline.

In Ethiopia, Kenya, Ghana and Uganda, influencers and bloggers peddle conspiracy theories against homosexuality to stoke a moral panic about LBTIQ+ people recruiting children into homosexuality, and this in turn incenses audiences who attack LBTIQ+ people or people perceived to be queer. These fears are also stoked by political figures who capitalize on anti-LBTIQ+ campaign points during election season, as it is an easy way to garner support. These moral panics have escalated into physical attacks against targets in many instances, pointed out by respondents.

We launched a campaign in response to the Family Values Bill in Ghana, but in 2023, we saw the Family Protection Bill in Kenya, and then the Anti Homosexuality Act in Uganda. Then we started hearing from partners that MPs in Ethiopia, for example, had gone to do benchmarking in Uganda to pass a similar kind of law. At the same time, we were also noticing that when the bills in Kenya and Uganda came up, there were coordinated social media anti LGBT campaigns. They would have similar messaging and similar hashtags, saying maybe things like ‘no LGBT in Kenya. No LGBT Uganda.’ They would be spreading a lot of hate about queer people.”

~Interview Respondent.

5. Technology Companies are Still Failing TFGBV Survivors

In addition, platforms seem to have a tiered approach to responding to TFGBV concerns, where individuals and organizations in the Global North receive faster responses when they escalate TFGBV cases as compared to those in the Global South. The need for extra explanations on how a social media post is TFGBV-based on the local context and nuance also means that there is slower resolution and less escalation success rates for Global South-based individuals and organizations. In addition, individuals tend to be less successful than organizations when they report TFGBV cases.

There is also a pattern where highly visible actors such as politicians, journalists, bloggers and influencers incite and orchestrate TFGBV attacks against women, activists and LBTIQ+ people, but do not get any repercussions from social media platforms. In contrast, however, the victims of such coordinated attacks often get banned from platforms, losing their accounts and, in some cases, any income that they may be earning on those accounts.

Impacts of TFGBV

1. An NGO Exit from Social Media Organizing

Facing heightened levels of online attacks due to the global shift to conservatism, coordinated and statesponsored attacks, and weak content moderation and support structures from tech companies, a lot of NGOs and activists are stepping back from open social media platforms. Working on such topics not only exposes them to direct harm, but they often experience secondary revictimization from being exposed to negative stories or seeing the responses people have towards the topics they speak about.

For us, we noticed, for example, around the time that a lot of the coordinated inauthentic behaviour was happening in Kenya and Uganda. When we’d report, for example, just regular social media users posting the same kind of hate, some of it was taken down. However, when an MP makes those same statements, it would not be taken down”.

~Interview Respondent

Lastly, technology platform features and architecture are not designed with the safety of users in mind, hence they end up promoting and facilitating TFGBV instead. For instance, reporting processes are opaque and contain inaccessible language that intimidates TFGBV victims from reporting abusive content. One respondent spoke of how she was not able to support a victim of NCII in reporting the intimate images being circulated on WhatsApp, as these messages are usually encrypted. Reports also often come back as unsuccessful and with no further explanation, even when the content reported clearly violates policies.

It’s honestly been very hard to do this work as a queer person myself. I have to go and go to George Kaluma’s Twitter and see all of the nonsensical things he’s saying there, and then you have to document all of these violent messages, people telling you to kill people like you. It’s been very hard” Interview Respondent George Kaluma is a Kenyan Legislator who has led a lot of anti-LBTIQ+ rights mobilisation.”

~Interview Respondent

But also, just because of the work that I’m doing, because I’m reporting on femicides, because I talk a lot about GBV, I tend to be very scared of men. And even when people are talking to me about their own relationships; my daughter, my nieces, my younger sisters, when they are talking to me about relationships with men, I continue to speak about the fact that they need to be careful. Like, have you seen the things that I’m reporting? You need to be really, really careful with what you are doing. So, I’ve become really vigilant.”

~Interview Respondent

More recently, organisations have also realised that harm is not just targeted towards them, but also anyone who engages with their content or shows any form of solidarity. Queer organizations in Uganda, Ethiopia, and Cameroon noted that online mobs will take their time to review any accounts that comment on or even like their content and harass them, accuse them of being gay, doxx them and threaten to physically find and attack them. To prevent harm, not only to themselves but also to the larger communities, feminist and queer activists and organizers are retreating to closed online communities and using communication networks that allow for unidirectional engagement. Newsletters, for instance, offer them the ability to disseminate information, and not receive anything in response. Platforms like WhatsApp and Zoom are also preferred for closer connection. Depending on the situation, some are also embracing offline organizing. Queer organizations in countries like Uganda and Zimbabwe, however, have had to cut back on offline gatherings as a result of the possibility of being physically attacked.

2. NGOs Bear the Burden of Reaching out to Technology Companies

In the cases where people experience TFGBV, NGOs have become intermediaries who try and support survivors to get social media platforms to address the act by banning accounts, taking down violative content, restoring survivors’ accounts, etc. Some NGOs and activists are able to support survivors in this way as they are in tech platforms’ partner networks, or they simply have an insider contact. However, this process is often difficult and time-intensive for NGOs and activists. In this case, organizations are performing unpaid and undervalued labour on behalf of platforms that are falling short in their duty of care to users, especially ones at extreme risk of physical violence. In addition, cases often take long to get addressed even when survivors are at risk of being harmed. Interviewees noted how difficult this work is, and how some platforms are not collaborative in this process.

There’s one case that came to us from Nigeria where someone had created a Dropbox folder of non-consensual intimate images of women and underage girls, and was circulating links on Twitter. Because there were so many accounts that were posting the links, and it was a bit difficult to keep track. It seemed like the best thing to do would be to go directly to Dropbox for them to make that link unavailable. While we work with social media companies, we had never dealt with Dropbox. Now we were having to think about who we know at Dropbox. How can we get them to deal with this? When we reached out to them, they asked so many questions, such as, “How do you know that the people in the images are underage? Have they complained to you directly?”

~Interview Respondent

TikTok does not care. They were not responsive. They did nothing. TikTok does not have any deliberate attempt on their side to try and protect people…TikTok was not responsive at all.”

~Interview Respondent

We noted that a lot of the time when we escalate through the helpline, the content is taken down, but when the partners are reporting the content themselves, it’s not taken down. We noticed that disparity in response, which is very, very concerning. Yeah, but that’s mostly how I get a lot of online hate and violence cases that come to me.”

~Interview Respondent

3. TFGBV has Significant Economic Impacts on Survivors

TFGBV affects victims’ economic status in many ways. There is a stigma attached to being a TFGBV victim, and this is evident when employers refrain from offering victims job opportunities because they see them as a reputational liability. TFGBV, such as trolling on social media, is often public and sensationalised, leading victims to be seen as a reputational risk to employers. As a result, such online attacks result in job loss, inability to advance professionally, denial of opportunities, or permanent damage to professional reputation. One respondent, who is a content creator, gave an example of an instance when she was a victim of her images being circulated nonconsensually in Telegram group chats, and she was warned that this would make her lose brand deals.

The economic impacts of TFGBV are gendered, with women and LBTIQ+ people facing disproportionate impact. Respondents severally gave the example of how intimate image circulation had so much impact on women’s lives but did not make a dent in men’s reputations and earning potentials. TFGBV victims not only lose employment opportunities but also lose time at work when they have to take breaks to cope with the psychological and economic impacts of TFGBV. Victims who have to use social media for work particularly face the brunt of TFGBV as they still have to go back to these spaces and engage with the same audiences that harassed them.

For victims of brigading through mass reporting and doxxing, the economic impact is two-fold. Not only do they incur costs in retreating from online spaces, changing physical locations and buying new uncompromised devices, they also lose out on earnings if they get deplatformed through successful mass reporting campaigns. Social media platforms often take a long time to respond to such appeals, and in most cases, the feedback is rarely positive, leading to victims having to rebuild online audiences from scratch.

Content creation is already precarious work, and such forms of harassment make it even harder to earn a dependable income through online platforms. In countries where queer people are criminalised, social media is often one of the few avenues where they can safely earn an income. However, in these countries, it is common for queer people to be targeted through mass harassment campaigns, and they tend to lose their accounts and ultimately, their income in such periods. Trans people were identified as existing in extreme situations, as once they are outed, they can no longer show up in places of work or study and have to physically relocate or go into hiding.

This girl. I think she was in university in Busia. She was outed in school, and then now she had to drop out, because everyone was talking about her and she couldn’t go back to school.”

Interview Respondent

I know of a transwoman who has faced so much backlash, and her account was shut down, and she lost a lot of her followers and opportunities, and she had to start over from scratch. So, she has to create, for example, three or four accounts. She is on her fourth Facebook account now. Luckily, she’s in Europe, so she’s safer now, and her account cannot be shut down the way the three previous were shut down. When I interviewed her in 2018, she had like 800,000 followers, and back then, that was a lot. Nearly 1 million.”

~Interview Respondent

When the Anti LGBT movement started their campaign, she started receiving so much hate, and I think her account was mass-reported and was taken down. She lost her account, and it was sad because she was also using that account to make money on TikTok Live. Now she isn’t able to do that anymore because of that.”

~Interview Respondent

In more severe cases, victims of TFGBV have had to relocate or go into exile in neighbouring countries to prevent physical harm. This is a very expensive undertaking that often leaves victims in precarious situations, such as living in refugee camps or living in foreign countries while suspended in legal limbo. It also leads to loss of community, livelihood and stability.

Why TFGBV Persists

1. TFGBV Is a Continuum of Violence

TFGBV operates on a continuum that connects violence in digital spaces to physical spaces. Online harassment, abuse and threats often escalate or co-occur with physical, psychological and economic harm in physical spaces. Intimate partner violence, for instance, co-occurs with technological abuses such as surveillance and destruction of devices. Acts such as doxxing, surveillance, hacking and unauthorised access to accounts and devices and brigading are often precursors to physical abuse of victims, and lead to the loss of physical safety, employment opportunities, housing and even social ties. Other acts such as harassment, stalking and threats may not manifest into physical harm, but still leave victims in distress as they exist under the constant threat of attack. Women who are visible in online spaces, whether it is for work or personal reasons, have expressed feeling hyper-visible in physical spaces, especially when people send them messages letting them know that they see them. Feminist activists who use the internet as their workspace have also expressed this fear, as speaking about topics like femicide often leads to backlash. One respondent spoke about how her work in documenting femicide cases often led to backlash, where people threatened to find her physically.

“

Sometimes I will be required to post on the ground in real time, which becomes a safety issue because there are creeps online... I’ve gotten DMs saying ‘I can see you sitting there wearing...’ There’s been a man who came up to me and said, ‘I can’t believe you don’t recognize me’... ‘I follow you on Instagram.”

~Interview Respondent

2. Legal and Regulatory Gaps Promote TFGBV

Survivors of TFGBV should be able to turn to legal institutions to support them in seeking justice against their perpetrators. Yet, legal structures in the countries that the respondents come from do not have provisions for TFGBV. Jurisdictions are also still grappling with factors that enable TFGBV, such as actionat-a-distance, anonymity and automation, which also make the cases harder to handle. In addition, TFGBV is still trivialised as just online abuse that can be stopped by logging off social media. Police and judicial institutions still lack an understanding of the severity of TFGBV, the likelihood of these acts escalating into physical violence, and the nuances of cybercrimes. In addition, the process of reporting TFGBV is often a source of re-victimisation for victims, as it is often not survivor centred. For instance, with NCII, police will often ask for the evidence of the abuse, which is usually the same intimate images that have caused trauma to the victim.

For LBTIQ+ people and human rights activists, the problem is further compounded as TFGBV acts against them are often state-coordinated and sanctioned, and legal institutions such as the police harm them further instead of providing them with support. In Ghana, one respondent noted that it was the police using dating apps like Grindr to bait, entrap and consequently physically harm queer people. Perpetrators are emboldened to enact TFGBV against such groups, as the existence of laws that criminalise freedom of expression and speech, and outlaw LBTIQ+ people’s existence, means that a victim exposes themselves to the possibility of being arrested if they report TFGBV abuses. One such example is the aforementioned case in Ethiopia, where a state-led witch-hunt on establishments perceived to offer services to LBTIQ+ people escalated into coordinated attacks and mass harassment against anyone who was perceived as queer on social media platforms. Judicial institutions also enable these acts, as their judgments are often steeped in patriarchal norms and beliefs.

“ “

But of course, when you go legal in our context, you will find that if I went to the police to report that particular case, I would be arrested, because they would ignore the case I am reporting for harassment, and then they will focus on my sexuality, and so that compromises everything. ”

~Interview Respondent

Often, if you decide to pursue such a case, the court is open. You never know if a journalist is going to come there and pick up your case, so you look at justice first as outing, and you’re like, “Aii, it’s not a good route to go to”

~Interview Respondent

Resilience and Adaptive Strategies

1. Digital Security Training Promotes Resilience against TFGBV

One unintended side effect of TFGBV is that it has encouraged organizations to adopt digital security measures as a way to build resilience and resistance. Across the landscape, organizations are shifting from spreading awareness about TFGBV to teaching skills on how to navigate these online attacks. Experiencing TFGBV attacks such as hacking and phishing attempts, account takeovers, outing, and doxxing has also increased organizations’ situational awareness. Organizations now have guidelines for what to do in case of such attacks and appoint specific people with high levels of digital security to be the ones to oversee organizational social media accounts.

So, someone just took over our WordPress and just began posting nonsense in there. I don’t even know how they got it, but apparently our comms person logged into the account in a cafe and forgot about it. And so, someone just came and found it there and just began posting nonsense and stuff. So, I think that’s where our digital security journey started, but also how we transitioned from only looking at violence offline to also looking at the violence online.”

~Interview Respondent

“

When we first began the program, most of us didn’t see the need. Most organizations were using social media as platforms for creating awareness, sharing their programs and engaging people. But it was just for formality. At the beginning, it was less serious, but now we are in an era where people take it very seriously, and a number of organizations have taken it on as a practice, training their staff, training members for member-led organizations.”

~Interview Respondent

Digital security training is a source of resilience for victims, especially as there is little legal recourse for TFGBV. However, lack of funding means that digital security training happens infrequently and is not followed up with new modules that mirror the rapid changes in technology and social media platform architecture.

Part III: Advocacy Pathways and Recommendations

Building on the trends and patterns identified in this study, the recommendations below respond to the clear reality that TFGBV is a structural barrier and threat to women and girls’ personal safety, civic participation and economic survival. The findings demonstrate that TFGBV harm is shaped by technology platform moderation failures, a global antirights mobilization, and legal and institutional harms that trivialise TFGBV and retraumatise survivors. At the moment, most of the responsibility to end TFGBV has been unfairly and disproportionately allocated to women’s rights organizations and grassroots rights movements that are increasingly underfunded and overburdened, especially when compared to antigender and anti-rights movements. These recommendations aim to redistribute responsibility to those with power and duty to act, including states, platforms, and donors, while also strengthening movement capacity. They centre care, uphold survivor autonomy, and advance feminist visions for digital spaces in which women and girls can participate freely and safely.

Recommendations for Feminists, Women’s Rights Organizations and Grassroots Movements

Feminists, women’s rights organisations and grassroots movements remain at the forefront of TFGBV response, functioning as first responders and support systems in harsh social and political environments, but also in cases where technology platforms are unresponsive or uncooperative. The women we interviewed spoke in depth about how, in this environment, organizations are already adapting and being inventive in ways that they provide support to victims but also protect themselves from TFGBV. Despite their efforts, this frontline support for TFGBV survivors is happening amidst resource constraints and the rapid increase in technology-facilitated harm. The findings of this study show that there is a need for organizations to move from the type of ad hoc crisis support that they are accustomed to, to more collaborative and sustainable modes of responding to TFGBV. Therefore, we recommend the following pathways for women’s rights organizations and grassroots movements:

1. Building Collective Digital Security and Literacy

From the interviews with respondents, organizations often begin formalising digital security practices and protocols only after experiencing direct attacks such as disinformation campaigns, doxxing, phishing, and forced social media account takeovers. In addition, in harsh political and social environments, digital security training offers the most practical and immediate form of protection when legal, platform and institutional pathways are inaccessible, unsafe and unresponsive. Given the critical work that organizations are performing, it is important that digital security is treated as a core part of organizational infrastructure and not as an afterthought.

There is a need to integrate digital security practices into day-to-day operations, outline clear guidance for device and account management, secure data storage and conduct risk assessments for staff and community members who face heightened exposure. For instance, a CEO in an organization has higher visibility and would be rated at a higher risk of being targeted in TFGBV attacks. Training for staff should also be accessible and cover fundamentals, such as how to report content, platform community guidelines, and how to respond to negative or abusive comments and DMs.

As specialist support is often inaccessible, organizations and movements should prioritise peer-to-peer training models that allow them to share learnings and reduce dependence on external experts.

This is especially important in areas such as AI, where organizations have demonstrated inadequate understanding of how AI harm occurs, and how to protect themselves and the survivors they serve from AI-mediated harm. Lastly, collective care must be embedded as part of organisational security. Responders and caseworkers documenting abuse and supporting survivors are exposed to secondary trauma, while also carrying organisational risk when they are publicly visible. As a result, mental health support and resources should be treated as part of digital security practice.

Strategic retreat should also be recognised as a legitimate safety and resistance tactic against TFGBV. The evidence shows that withdrawal from public platforms is already a survival strategy for many victims and for women in public-facing roles, but it comes with economic consequences, particularly where digital visibility is tied to work. Organisations should therefore develop plans for when retreat from public social media spaces is necessary. Such plans can outline alternative channels and mediums for public engagement and mitigation strategies for their reduced visibility to potential funders.

3. Movement Solidarity and Knowledge Sharing Across Regions and Borders

TFGBV is increasingly shaped by coordinated anti-rights and anti-gender mobilisation that travels across contexts and even utilizes similar messaging and campaign methods. As a result, movements also need to respond in this networked manner. Organisations should strengthen regional and crossborder solidarity mechanisms by creating regional networks where they can share early warnings, tactics, and response models. This approach is important as most of these tactics and threats tend to be replicated at scale across countries and platforms.

Knowledge-sharing should include both operational practices, such as emergency response and digital security protocols and advocacy interventions. Organizations should also develop coordinated response strategies for when such campaigns and attacks escalate. These strategies could incorporate shared messaging frameworks, shared narratives to counter anti-gender messaging, and rapid documentation systems to track evolving narratives across countries and platforms.

2. Strategic Communication and Platform Selection

Feminist organizations face a difficult conundrum where visibility in online spaces enables and amplifies advocacy, but at the same time increases their exposure to harassment, coordinated attacks and unfair platform penalties that result in account shadow bans and removals, and income loss. As a result, organizations and movements need to carefully and deliberately assess choices about platform visibility, including when to conduct public-facing campaigns and when to revert to lower-risk formats like closed groups and newsletters. Ultimately, organizations should have diverse communications, using a mix of open channels for public messaging, and encrypted channels for sensitive organising and community care, particularly where surveillance or entrapment risks are present.

When dealing with platform failures such as weak enforcement in local languages, slower and less successful escalation for Global South users, opaque reporting processes, and inconsistent outcomes even where content clearly violates policies, organizations can collaborate in their responses. First, movements and individual activists can partner with organizations that already have relationships with technology companies to establish reporting collectives, where they aid each other in reporting content or submitting requests. This can help especially in crisis situations where delays cause even more harm to TFGBV victims. Second, organizations can build shared evidence banks documenting platform inconsistencies and failures, as this strengthens their collective advocacy capacity when campaigning for adequate responses to TFGBV.

Recommendations for Policy Makers and Governments

Governments have the primary responsibility to protect human rights, including in digital spaces. The trends documented in this study have demonstrated that the trivialisation of TFGBV as simply an online infraction is a direct pipeline into the structural neglect that exists in legal and judicial institutions. There is a need for governments and policymakers to address TFGBV as a serious form of violence and a precursor to real-world harm. As a result, we recommend the following pathways for governments:

1. Recognition of the TFGBV in Legislation

National legal frameworks should explicitly recognise TFGBV as gender-based violence and provide remedies that reflect the distinct characteristics of technology-facilitated harm, including action-at-adistance, anonymity, rapid dissemination, and the permanence of digital traces. They also need to acknowledge that TFGBV occurs on a continuum of violence and, as a result, demands immediate response, even at the legal and judicial levels. These responses should be survivor-centred, reducing the exposure of victims to re-traumatisation as they report the abuse, and providing protection against retaliation and escalation. In addition, in contexts where identities and livelihoods are criminalised and stigmatised, legislation should ensure that survivors are not criminalised when they seek support.

Governments should also enable easier cross-border cooperation in response to the transnational nature of TFGBV and the ease with which acts such as NCII go viral, enabling non-consensual content to be disseminated across jurisdictions. Streamlining data sharing agreements and reporting lines, and also harmonising definitions for TFGBV at the regional and international levels, will strengthen capacity for investigation and redress for TFGBV survivors.

2. Digital Security and AI Literacy Training

Just like feminist activists, women’s rights organizations and grassroots movements, institutions such as the judiciary and the police lack adequate training when it comes to handling TFGBV, especially with understudied modalities such as AI and encrypted messaging and data sharing platforms. Police and judicial actors often lack the technical understanding required to investigate TFGBV and the gendered analysis required to assess escalation risk and survivor safety. Governments should fund sustained, mandatory training for law enforcement, prosecutors and judicial officers on TFGBV, including safe evidence preservation, risk assessment linked to offline escalation, and survivor-centred practice. This should be accompanied by specialised capacity within institutions, including TFGBV-trained cybercrime units and accessible legal aid and advice services. Governments should also provide tailored services to survivors who face heightened vulnerability. For instance, for rural communities with low digital literacy, the support provided must be accessible, locally appropriate and at par with the services victims in major urban areas would receive.

3. Platform Accountability through Regulation and Public Policy

As identified in this report, persistent platform failures cannot be resolved through voluntary commitments alone. Respondents described poor enforcement, especially in Global South contexts and local languages, and a tiered safety reality where Global North organisations receive faster escalation outcomes than Global South individuals and organisations. The findings also document how highly visible perpetrators, including political actors, can incite or orchestrate attacks without repercussions, while victims face bans, account loss and loss of income. Governments should therefore develop regulatory approaches that require platforms to respond faster to TFGBV escalations that can lead to real-world harm, resource moderation and enforcement equitably across markets, and publish regionally disaggregated transparency reporting that enables meaningful accountability.

Regulation should also address design-level amplification of harm, including virality dynamics that accelerate harassment and doxxing campaigns, as described by respondents. Lastly, governments should mandate platforms to conduct human rights and gender impact assessments in the markets they operate in to proactively identify localised risks and ensure that they are not causing disproportionate harm to vulnerable and marginalised groups.

Recommendations for Funders

1. Funding for Research in Understudied Areas of TFGBV

This study demonstrated that significant research gaps remain in understanding how technologyfacilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) affects women in rural areas, internally displaced women, and women living with disabilities. While qualitative accounts consistently indicate that these intersecting identities intensify TFGBV exposure and harm, there is a significant need for quantitative or mixedmethods studies that examine the distinct lived experiences of these groups in depth. Women at the intersection of these identities risk being systematically excluded from TFGBV prevention and response efforts, as their needs are less documented.

Additionally, TFGBV in Afghanistan and Nepal remains critically underexplored relative to the scale of the problem and the unique contextual factors shaping how violence occurs in these settings, including castebased systems, religious extremism, political instability, displacement, and social norms. Funders need to prioritize research that generates actionable insights across these understudied groups. This includes supporting community-based participatory research that centres the voices and experiences of rural, displaced, and disabled women. Country-specific and regional studies are needed to ensure that global TFGBV frameworks and solutions are relevant and responsive to these contexts.

2. Funding for TFGBV Support Networks

Local formal and informal organizations are already the first line of help when victims experience TFGBV. They provide contact with mental health professionals, help collect digital forensics and evidence needed for legal case filings, provide legal support and help victims understand the legal pathways to take, and liaise on behalf of victims with technology platforms. In addition, they are often the only support systems for victims in situations where seeking support using legal pathways could lead them to be criminalised.

Yet, this extensive work is underfunded, and resources continue to dwindle with recent reductions in funding in the digital rights space. At the same time, support needs are growing, especially as marginalized groups such as rural women, displaced people and LBT people are being identified as in need of extra support. Current resources remain insufficient relative to the growing scale of TFGBV harm. We recommend that increased, multi-year flexible funding be allocated to these organizations to enable them to institutionalise survivor support, scale digital security training, maintain emergency response capacity and relieve the unpaid burden of compensating for platform and state failures and inadequacies. This funding should also be allocated to movement-led research into understudied areas of TFGBV, such as its impacts on women living in rural areas, women living with disabilities, displaced women, etc.

Recommendations for Technology Platforms

Technology platforms and companies have a responsibility to ensure their products do not facilitate harm. This study shows that current approaches are falling short. Respondents described opaque reporting pathways with inaccessible language, repeated unsuccessful reports without explanation, even when content violates policy, and limited reporting options in encrypted contexts. In response to these challenges, we recommend the following pathways that technology companies need to take in the journey to eradicate TFGBV.

Platforms should embed safety as a core design principle and treat TFGBV as a predictable, preventable misuse case. Safety By Design is a framework that focuses on the ways technology companies can minimise online harm by proactively anticipating, detecting and eliminating harms (World Economic Forum, n.d.). In response to TFGBV, technology platforms can respond in multiple ways. To determine what types of harm could come out of a new tool, feature or platform, technology companies should invite organizations to red teaming exercises, where participants can test and identify points of harm. This is especially critical for new technologies such as AI that are bound to unleash unprecedented harms on marginalised and vulnerable people.

The feedback from these sessions should actually be incorporated into the design and development process, so that these processes are meaningful. At the detection phase, technology platforms need to incorporate more organizations, especially at the grassroots level, into their trusted partner channels. These channels allow organisations to report on behalf of TFGBV victims and get a faster response. These channels should also be accessible and easy to navigate, so as not to discourage organizations and movements from escalating harm. On their end, technology platforms need to audit these processes and determine whether responses to Global South-based organizations are being treated with the same manner of care as those from the Global North.

2. Improvement in Content Moderation and Enforcement

Currently, most platforms practice uneven enforcement of harmful content, particularly in Global South contexts where local languages are used, and slower and less successful escalation when contextual explanation is required to demonstrate TFGBV harm. Platforms must resource moderation adequately across all languages and markets in which they operate, and build context expertise that can identify coded misogyny, politically driven harassment, and threats linked to offline escalation. Enforcement must also be consistent regardless of the status of the perpetrator. Respondents described a pattern where political figures and highly visible actors incite or orchestrate attacks without consequences, while victims are banned and deplatformed. This is a safety failure and an equity failure, and it directly undermines women’s civic participation and livelihoods.

3. Transparency and Accountability

TFGBV cannot be fully addressed if technology platforms are not held accountable for their failures. More efforts need to be put behind holding platforms accountable not only for their content moderation failures, but also for their asymmetrical efforts in user safety. Technology platforms need to explicitly address inequities such as gaps in local language and context coverage, lower moderation standards for public figures, unequal response rates for Global South users and organizations, and regional disparities in product safety robustness. These platforms can be held accountable through local and international regulation that emphasises their duty of care to users, external auditing of policies and products, and mandatory regionally disaggregated transparency reports that show enforcement actions. Accountability should also include requirements for meaningful inclusion of Global South organizations and experts in their partner escalation channels and advisory boards. Meaningful inclusion means that their concerns are addressed in an equitable manner, and their advice is not just sought after but also implemented.

1. Safety By Design

A Vision for Feminist Digital Futures

The recommendations above are anchored in the Feminist Principles of the Internet that envision digital spaces as free from violence, and platforms that enable rights, agency and collective power. However, the reality of how the internet is being reshaped in an anti-rights and AI era is sobering. Funding for equitable safety efforts is dwindling, while platforms like X that were once bastions for movement building and collective action have been coopted and reordered. It is clear that the ground is fertile for the development of alternative platforms that are built and developed by feminists, governed by feminist principles and funded by movements.

In this feminist digital future, alternative platforms would consider access, and ensure that they are affordable, equitable and universal. In practice, this looks like developing platforms with lower digital bandwidths, incorporating open-source tooling so that movements are able to contribute to the infrastructure’s maintenance, and integrating disability friendly design, such as closed captioning and visual interpretation. It also looks like ensuring that diverse groups are able to access these platforms, and their content is moderated in an equitable manner that prioritises safety for all.

In response to the growing anti-rights movement, alternative feminist platforms would be built for and by movements. These platforms would reinvigorate feminist movements globally and allow them to network and connect with the goals of disrupting systems such as patriarchy and capitalism. Infrastructure that promotes movement building would allow for the virality of movement building efforts, integrate privacy measures by default to prevent adversaries from infiltrating and surveilling budding movements, and curtail disinformation that is used to derail collective action. Such platforms also go in the opposite direction of technology platforms and incorporate fair governance structures that do not penalise work done by feminist and women’s rights organizations and movements.

For instance, topics relating to abortion access, sexuality, and sexual and gender expression are frequently suppressed and shadowbanned on mainstream platforms. Alternative feminist platforms would prioritise feminist expression, prototypes and models for scaling while promoting these types of content, as access to this information is a human right.

In the current digital age, technology platforms are built to maximise profit, and this means that the design choices are primarily driven by revenue potential. Safety is regularly treated as an afterthought, as user safety often impedes rapid innovation and profitmaking. Alternative feminist platforms offer movements an opportunity to subvert this norm and prioritise spaces that center joy, feminist expression, community care, rest and collective action. To develop such spaces, movements can pool funding together to power the development of these platforms. Alternatively, movements can seek low-cost ways of building and maintaining these platforms. While the AI era has many downsides, it has also ushered in a renaissance in independent technology development. With open AI models and open-source software, movements can build these spaces on their own, and borrowing from the open-source model, appoint trusted maintainers who keep the infrastructure running and safe from surveillance and hacking.

Lastly, alternative platforms built by and for feminists take an embodied approach and reject the false distinction between online and offline harm. To effectively tackle TFGBV, such platforms would acknowledge that TFGBV occurs on a continuum and respond with serious policies and enforcement practices that curb these acts but also ensure violative members are ejected from these communities. These platforms would also explicitly disavow TFGBV and make it clear that they are spaces for safe connection, movement building, joy and collective action against power and systemic injustice.

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