Feminist Activism and Platform Politics

159 Pages·2022·7.678 MB·English

by  Verity Anne Trott

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FEMINIST ACTIVISM AND
PLATFORM POLITICS
Verity Anne Trott
Feminist Activism and Platform Politics
Trott interrogates how feminist activists navigate complex technological
ecosystems to build awareness of misogyny, violence against women, and
oppressive experiences women face both online and offline while cultivating
transnational feminist networks and carving out spaces upon which to build
and elevate women’s voices.
This book is guided by a few key questions: how is feminist activism trans-
forming and being mutually shaped by a dynamic and volatile platform
ecosystem? How are activists attempting to negotiate this terrain? And, how
are (anti)feminist politics contested within the platform society? These ques-
tions are addressed through analysis of three key case studies: the interna-
tional feminist organisation Hollaback!; the #EndViolenceAgainstWomen
campaign; and the global #TakeDownJulienBlanc movement. Building
on the intersecting fields of feminist media studies, platform and internet
research, and political communication, this book addresses cultural and
social questions about how digital platforms shape the values of our com-
munities and how stakeholders negotiate and engage in civic practices.
This timely and important work interweaves activist discourses, women’s
voices and scholarly literature together to provide insight into the realities
of operating within a platform society. It will be of interest to students and
scholars of journalism, gender studies, media and communication studies,
culture studies, and sociology.
Verity Anne Trott is Lecturer in Digital Media Research in the School of
Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University. Her published research
explores digital feminist activism, networked masculinities, online com-
munities and digital cultures and has appeared in international journals
including New Media & Society, Information Communication & Society and
Feminist Media Studies.
“Verity Trott’s Feminist Activism and Platform Politics does a brilliant
job of describing and analysing individual actions and #hashtag activ-
ism but setting them in the context from which these actions emerge.
Read right to the end to discover why it’s #yesallwomen. Scholarly but
also beautifully written.”
Dr Jenna Price, Australian National University, Australia
“Feminist Activism and Platform Politics provides a timely and com-
pelling intervention into the complexities of digital spaces as sites of
gendered violence and feminist resistance. Verity Trott offers a thought-
ful and nuanced account of how platform architecture, misogyny and
resistance are deeply intertwined.”
Dr Bianca Fileborn, University of Melbourne, Australia
Feminist Activism and
Platform Politics
Verity Anne Trott
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2023 Verity Anne Trott
The right of Verity Anne Trott to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Trott, Verity Anne, author.
Title: Feminist activism and platform politics / Verity Anne Trott.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022030601 (print) | LCCN 2022030602 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032357737 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032357744 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003328506 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Ecofeminism. | Women and the environment. |
Misogyny. | Women--Social networks. | Women--Political activity. |
Environmentalism. | Feminists. | Sex discrimination against women.
Classification: LCC HQ1194 .T76 2023 (print) | LCC HQ1194 (ebook) |
DDC 305.4201--dc23/eng/20220714
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022030601
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022030602
ISBN: 978-1-032-35773-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-35774-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-32850-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003328506
Typeset in Times New Roman
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements xii
Introduction: Feminist platform politics 1
What are platforms? 1
Digital feminist activism 2
Intersectionality 4
Studying digital feminist activism 7
1 The blogosphere and feminist-owned platforms 15
The Hollaback! story 15
The blogosphere 19
Owned platforms 24
Feminist platform policies 29
2 Mapping tools, organisational platforms, and online communities 33
Mapping street harassment 33
Mobile technologies and organising platforms 41
HeartMob 46
3 Social media platforms and toxic-techno cultures 52
Geek origins of social media platforms 57
#EndViolenceAgainstWomen 61
Feminist digilantism on social media 64
4 Negotiating feminist values on social media platforms 73
Hashtags and algorithmic culture 75
Community guidelines and moderation 79
Division and closure: Digital feminisms and
intersectionality 87
vi Contents
5 Social action platforms and the manosphere 95
Pickup artists, masculinity, and the manosphere 96
#TakeDownJulienBlanc 98
Social action platforms 104
6 Web infrastructure and alt-tech 116
Event management platforms 118
Donation and revenue services 119
Email marketing, webhosting services, and domain
registrars 121
DDoS protection services 123
The rebirth of 8chan and the rise of the alt-tech Alliance 125
Conclusion 134
Index 143
Preface
On 19 August 2017, I woke up to dozens of emails from Academia.edu to
alert me that my academic profile had received a large number of views
overnight. This was surprising as I had very little content on my profile, and
I was only just wrapping up the second year of my PhD candidature. The
source of attention on my profile was a conference paper I had uploaded
some months earlier that explored themes relating to rape culture in season 1
of the joint Netflix-Marvel television series Jessica Jones. The conference
talk, which was later published as a chapter in a film studies book about
superheroes (Trott 2018), detailed how the show challenges common rape
myths through the construction of the villain Kilgrave (played by David
Tennant) and how male entitlement is manifest through the character’s
mind control superpowers.
The analytics provided by Academia.edu allowed me to see that much
of this sudden increase in traffic to my profile and conference paper was
being directed from a particular post on Reddit1. Reddit is a pseudonymous
bulletin board-style news aggregate platform in which communities form
as “subreddits” around particular topics and interests. Following the source
link from the Academia.edu analytics, I found a discussion thread on the
subreddit r/Television that shared a media article by the American gam-
ing website Polygon that has a partnership with Vox Media, an American
news and media site considered to be progressive or left-leaning. The media
article drew attention to and applauded a “powerful scene” in which Luke
Cage explains white privilege to the Iron Fist in the recent Netflix-Marvel
Defenders series that unites several superheroes including Jessica Jones.
Underneath the post on Reddit was a polarised exchange between two
users. A summary of the exchange is detailed below:
User A: Will Jessica Jones talk about the gender wage gap in Season 2?
Will Daredevil talk about gasp able bodied privilege? I swear, Polygon
drives me up the wall with these kinds of articles. “Powerful
scenes” … “oppressively misogynistic” but no proof is given.
User B: That would be pretty awesome! Jessica Jones season one was
about rape culture so I wouldn’t be surprised.
viii Preface
User A: They have rape festivals in Jessica Jones? Or the show glorified
rape?? That sounds fucked up!
User B: Don’t be obtuse. Anyways, here is a good paper written on it.”
My stomach plummeted as I saw the final part of User B’s comment was
hyperlinked and directed users straight to my conference paper. User B
appeared to think they were doing something good by sharing the paper to
educate other users in their Reddit community; however they were embroiled
in a “debate” with a user whose discourse was saturated with the troll-like,
anti-feminist, misogynistic, white supremacist, ironic dialogue distinctive
of the toxic techno cultures and alt-right communities described by numer-
ous digital culture researchers (Viveca Greene 2019; Asaf Nissenbaum and
Limor Shifman 2017, Jessica Ringrose and Emilie Lawrence 2018, Emma
Jane 2014 to name a few) and that characterised the infamous gendered
online harassment campaigns of Gamergate that began several years earlier.
User A enraged by my paper set up a strawman argument by asking, “Do
you think all or even most straight white privileged men only think of rap-
ing?” and described my paper as “shallow minded and prejudiced.” The
arguments here draw on what has become known as a “classic” rebuttal to
feminist activism that aims to derail attempts to address male violence and
deflect one’s complicity in a system and society that upholds male power and
enables rape culture – understood as the social and cultural norms that ena-
ble rape and sexual violence (e.g. victim-blaming and slut-shaming a woman
based on what they were wearing and framing them as “asking for it” is
an explicit example of the mechanisms of rape culture) (Buchwald, Fletcher
and Roth 2005)2. The exchange between the users rapidly deteriorates as
User B reveals themselves to be a straight white man and a feminist ally.
In response, User A’s language becomes more extreme and hate-fuelled,
declaring User B to be a “race traitor” determined to “create problems for
your white race”.
Closing my web browser, I hoped the post would not gain too much
traction as I did not want to become the target of an anti-feminist harass-
ment campaign. The views to my Academia.edu profile gradually slowed
over the next few days until, perhaps a month later, I received a number of
follow requests on the image-based social networking platform Instagram
and several odd messages in the “other” folder on Facebook messenger –
the digital space in which messages from strangers are directed. A few of
these Facebook messages were from fake profiles, or what were essentially
shells of profiles, with the blue and white silhouette of a masculine “neutral”
figure as the default profile picture, a generic name, and little other infor-
mation. Their messages to me declared, “You’ve been exposed!” and shared
a suspect-looking link. Assuming these messages were just spam, I ignored
them until I received a more modest message from a stranger beginning
with an apology, “Sorry this is a bit awkward, I’m not sure if you are aware
but someone is sharing your nudes on this site”, and they shared a link.
Preface ix
Still suspicious, I looked up a URL checking service and finding Google’s
Transparency Report ‘safe browsing’ tool ran the shared URL to check if
it was considered safe to open. Confirming its legitimacy, I clicked on the
link and found myself on a particular niche porn website with a photo of
a nude white blonde young woman posted next to several screenshots of
my Academia.edu profile, my partially visible LinkedIn profile and private
Instagram profile with large text saying “exposed slut”.
I sighed a breath of relief and laughed when I saw the nude photo was
not me but was alarmed at the screenshots of my social networking p rofiles
that were posted and the amount of follow requests and awkward mes-
sages I was receiving from strangers on other platforms. I quickly realised,
as previous research into the consequences of image-based sexual abuse has
found (Henry et al. 2020), the posting of false “revenge porn” – that is the
non-consensual posting of one’s sexual images, or in this case falsely claim-
ing a nude image to be of me and maliciously posting it along with my work
information which is also a form of “doxing” – can have the same effects as
posting a “real” nude photo. Briefly looking around the porn site I was able
to quickly find a report button, flag the post and select from a drop-down
menu the category of offense the post fell into – in this case, the “revenge
porn” category. The post was quickly suspended from the website.
This smooth process of reporting, however, ended up being an uncom-
mon experience. Unfortunately, there was a community of users on this
site who used the space to compile galleries of image-based abuse and
to dox women across the globe. The platform administrator of this par-
ticular niche porn site was adamantly against image-based abuse, which
is why they had designed an easily available and quickly responsive con-
tent moderation process. Yet, due to the lack of resources available to the
administrator, the reliance on the good faith of users to report content
that breached community standards, and that the website was predom-
inantly a hobby, the platform owner struggled to address the scale of
image-based abuse and ended up shutting down their site, leaving a public
notice posted on the now defunct platform that expressed frustration and
disappointment that their site was weaponised and misused for malicious
purposes. However, the communities of users who engage in this prac-
tice of image-based abuse exist across a wide spectrum of platforms and
despite this particular platform shutting down, some users had offline cop-
ies of their revenge porn galleries which they periodically upload onto
other platforms contributing to the continual proliferation of these images
and making it practically impossible to remove image-based abuse from
the web.
Over the past few years, despite removing public photos of myself from
my work profiles, having my social networking profiles set to private, and
changing my username, I encounter waves of attention as the same image
is reuploaded onto various sites. The majority of these sites are either ded-
icated pornography platforms which have a social networking element to