The Platform Question: Power, Accountability and Global South
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as the particularities of each dialectal variant by country
and region.
Incorporate a gender and human rights perspective in the
development of each stage of the technologies.
After that first approach in 2018, a second meeting was
organized by the company in Chile in 2019, as our country was
being targeted to consolidate a growth hub for Facebook and
Instagram. This time, the general announcements pointed
to the possibility of developing a collective alliance to more
quickly address cases of technology-facilitated gender-based
violence.
The possibility for civil society organizations was reduced to
having a direct contact at Facebook to address complex cases
not resolved by the platform’s security policies in the first
instance (appeals, blocks, deactivated accounts, usurpation,
among others), and which required extra verification of trust.
This direct contact lasted about a year and a half. Far from
specifically addressing the needs of organizations, it meant
more extra (and unpaid) work for civil society organizations,
specifically those that ran feminist helplines. Our organization,
for example, operated with two colleagues checking email
and social media daily, providing support to victims of digital
violence, and documenting cases that had not received a
response from the platforms in order to contact their Trust &
Safety teams.
Far from
specifically
addressing
the needs of
organizations, it
meant more extra
(and unpaid) work
for civil society
organizations,
specifically those
that ran feminist
helplines.
32
The main cases of technology-facilitated gender-based
violence that we observed during that period were directly
linked to the social context in Chile. As the feminist protests
that began in universities in 2018 spread to schools,
workplaces, and public discourse, we began to accompany
increasingly frequent cases of feminist groups losing access
to their accounts, coordinated digital attacks by hordes of
individuals, the exposure of their personal and intimate data,
and the sending of sexually aggressive content to their emails
and messaging services. If 2018 was the year of the feminist
movement, 2019 was the year of widespread social unrest. This
new scenario amplified and transformed the digital violence
that activists were already suffering. The social uprising that
began on October 18 in Chile, in response to the high cost
of living, not only filled the squares, but also social media
A Big Tech Accountability in Content Moderation with Feminist Perspective
The Platform Question: Power, Accountability and Global South
with evidence of brutal repression: beatings, illegal coercion
by state agents, and more than 460 eye injuries caused by
police gunfire. It was in this environment of high visibility
and online confrontation that platforms also consolidated
themselves as a battlefield and a source of identity. Violence
was no longer limited to harassment for being a feminist,
but was compounded by persecution for participating in the
uprising. While social movements used platforms to organize
protests and aid, their opponents used them to coordinate
attacks, engage in doxing, and make threats. The impunity that
characterized the repression in the streets was mirrored in the
platforms’ inaction in the face of digital violence, creating a
risky ecosystem where any woman in the public eye became
a potential target on all fronts. The Observatory Against Street
Harassment (OCAC), a Chilean organization that addresses
violence and harassment in public spaces, noted at the time:
“Social media and our website are the fastest way we have to
reach the women who follow us. That’s where we publish the
activities we’re doing, and we consider it a channel through
which people know they can write to us. For this reason, we
have to deal with a lot of misogyny from men who try to take
down our site or insistently write on every post we publish to
saturate our accounts with hate messages and thus prevent
the message from reaching the women and teenagers who
need it.”
As an NGO, Amaranta developed a research project during
that period called “Aurora,” which allowed us to conduct a
series of educational workshops for feminist organizations
and the LGBTIQ+ community, focusing on digital literacy,
how to correctly report content that violates the rules and
policies of large platforms, and how to use the same tools
to their advantage for these reports (for example, it is easier
to report humiliating content for copyright infringement
than for misogyny). As we approached 2020, the constant
communication channels we had with Facebook began to
fail. High staff turnover made it impossible to reconnect
with the platform. Added to its merger and name change,
contacts and communication channels were lost, and cases
of gender-based violence facilitated by technologies that were
not addressed in their reporting instances began to increase.
Their teams remained deployed in Brazil and Mexico, but the
While social
movements used
platforms to organize
protests and aid,
their opponents used
them to coordinate
attacks, engage in
doxing, and make
threats.
A Big Tech Accountability in Content Moderation with Feminist Perspective
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