Toward a Gender-Inclusive Internet: Strategies to Counter Harassment, Revenge Porn, Threats, and Online Abuse

From Gamergate to revenge porn, cyberharassment and abuse disproportionately target women around the world, often with devastating consequences. Reputations are damaged, personal safety put at risk, relationships shattered, and emotional well-being destroyed. Victims are often blamed for the abuse and told to toughen up. Those who dare to fight back face further abuse.

And while free speech is often cited as a defense to online harassment, there is significant evidence that women’s online participation and free speech are chilled by threats and harassment, particularly in forums where important public issues are discussed.

How does the law address this challenge? Can we create new norms online that support the participation of all, and if so, who should enforce them? Can bystanders to harassment and abuse be turned into “upstanders”, and how can technology contribute to solutions?

Join an expert panel to discuss how we can make a meaningful contribution to a gender-equal internet. Bring your ideas, your expertise, and your commitment to this working discussion.

Patrick Earley

Patrick Earley is a senior community advocate (CA) for the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). He started with the WMF as a liaison for the VisualEditor product team. The CA team facilitates communication between the Foundation staff and the many diverse editing communities and editors that make the project work. The team also assists the WMF legal team in their work and helps editors and readers with issues.

Sahar Habib Ghazi

Sahar Habib Ghazi is the managing editor of Global Voices. She leads the virtual newsroom and helps support an international network of 1,400 editors, writers, activists, and translators who report on compelling stories their communities are talking about on the internet in more than 167 countries. Sahar strives to empower marginalized and misrepresented people by telling underreported stories and countering mainstream narratives.

Sahar has reported for The New York Times, DawnNews, Geo News, and The News in Pakistan. In 2006, she helped launch Pakistan’s first English language TV station. In 2009, she produced a documentary series on US-Pakistan relations called “The Disposable Ally.” Sahar was a Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University in 2011.  Sahar is also on the board of Media Matters for Democracy, a media policy and research group in Pakistan.  She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Lena Gunn

Lena Gunn is the engineering manager at Hypothes.is, where she leads the content policy and abuse prevention initiatives. Lena’s background is in journalism and human rights. She studied the emergence of open-source communities in Latin America and later worked as a product manager for cooperatives and non-profits. She co-founded SulaBatsú, a social research cooperative in Costa Rica. Lena was part of the team that brought support for 35+ languages to Twitter.

Leslie Harris

Leslie Harris is an internet and technology policy lawyer who has been closely involved in the development of seminal internet policy and regulation in the United States and globally. She is currently a lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Information and principal of the Harris Strategy Group, which provides strategic advice on policy and strategy related to new technology, civil liberties, and human rights.

From 2005 to 2014, Harris served as president and CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a globally respected internet freedom organization working to keep the Internet open, innovative, and free. She led the organization’s work on a broad range of internet policy matters including consumer privacy, intellectual property, free expression, surveillance, cybersecurity, and net neutrality. She is a founder of the Global Network Initiative, a landmark corporate social responsibility initiative in the ICT sector.

Prior to joining CDT, Ms. Harris was the founder and president of a mission-driven tech policy firm in Washington, committed to closing the digital divide, developing the democratic potential of the internet, and supporting innovation. Earlier, she held senior policy leadership positions in two prominent civil liberties organizations and was in private law practice in Washington, D.C.

Jacob Hoffman-Andrews

Jacob works on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Encrypt the Web initiative. Prior to working at EFF, Jacob was on Twitter’s anti-spam and security teams, where he implemented HTTPS-by-default with forward secrecy, key pinning, HSTS, and CSP, in addition to deploying machine learning to detect spam in realtime.  Before Twitter, he worked at Google on web performance for Google Maps and helped launch Google Transit. Jacob wrote the anti-harassment Twitter tool Block Together in 20014 and continues to maintain the service as a personal project.

Erica T. Johnstone

Erica Johnstone is a partner at Ridder, Costa & Johnstone LLP, a San Francisco law firm focusing on intellectual property, internet, and privacy law. Erica specializes in representing people who have been harmed through the use of technology. She litigates online issues regarding the non-consensual distribution of sexually explicit images, harassment, the right to privacy, identity theft, impersonation, and defamation. Erica educates the public and lawmakers on these issues, and is on the cutting edge in using the legal system to identify and confront this new class of harms. She serves as part of California attorney general Kamala Harris’s Task Force Against Cyber Exploitation. She is the co-founder and vice president of Without My Consent, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that develops educational materials to empower victims of digital abuse to seek justice across the United States.

Jen King

Jen King is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Information, where she studies information privacy, specifically the social aspects of how people make decisions about their information privacy, and how privacy by design — or the lack of it — influences privacy choices. Jen formerly worked for technology companies (including Yahoo!, where she worked with the company’s Community team) and was a faculty researcher at the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at the UC Berkeley School of Law, where she helped advise the  Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN) with their creation of an online chat tool for survivors of abuse. Jen holds a MIMS degree (2006) from the School of Information. Her research is funded by grants from the NSF (TRUST), the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection, and through the Center for Long Term Cybersecurity. Her research with her advisor, Professor Deirdre Mulligan, has been recognized by the Future of Privacy Forum’s “Privacy Papers for Policymakers” annual awards. She has also been an invited speaker at workshops hosted by the Federal Trade Commission and has advised the commission as an expert witness on several matters related to privacy and deception.

Tonya Mosley

Tonya Mosley is a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford and a member of the winning team of the Affinis Labs “No2H8” Hackathon, sponsored by Facebook and Google, which challenged participants to develop a social-media campaign to combat online hate and extremism in 36 hours. Their winning app, “Activate your Squad,” harnesses a users’ social media connections to respond to hateful messages. An Emmy-nominated multiplatform journalist, Mosley was a regular television contributor to Al Jazeera America and several radio and print magazine outlets. Tonya has won several national awards for her four-part NPR radio series “Black in Seattle,” including a 2014 RTDNA Unity Award and the National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Award. Her print reporting on the Seattle Police Department’s handling of a murder investigation won her “Journalist of The Year” by the Washington Association for Justice. In 2014, she was named one of the “51 Most Influential People” by Seattle Magazine. Previously, Tonya was a staff reporter for KING 5 Television in Seattle, where her long-form story showcasing the ease of obtaining medical marijuana prescriptions was instrumental in legislators toughening medical marijuana laws.