Malaysia

Violence has a way of manifesting itself across different platforms – SMS, Zoom, Telegram, Facebook including the newly emerging platforms like Tik Tok and Clubhouse. The problem, therefore, lays not merely in the technology itself, but the underlying logic and profit model that propels the modus operandi of the algorithm, the content moderation policy and all other technologies deployed to…

In 2019 the High Court of Malaya (Malaysia) upheld a fatwa ruling that bans the organisation Sisters in Islam for going against Islamic teachings. In particular, this ruling limits their use of social media. Read more to hear about the complexities of activism and speech in Malaysia for feminist groups and individuals.

Here are insights into research on online gender-based violence against women and other minorities - especially around sexual objectification, delegitimisation of public personas, non-conformity to gender stereotypes and idealised notions of womanhood. Elena Pavan shares also about doing research using data scraped from online public discourses and the key questions going forward.

The emerging sub-field of research around gender and digital technology is united in its understanding that gender biases and stereotypes are embedded in technology, and that this reproduces the existing problems around gender parity, gender-based violence, discrimination and exclusion on the internet. This report is a mapping of the research around gender and digital technology in the decade…

A short comic on the anxieties of sharing yourself and your work online, and how one has to commodify all aspects of themselves online, which can open doors to unwanted risks and online hate.

Here is a compilation of the submissions from different countries including Democratic Republic of Congo, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Bosnia-Herzegovina to the Special Rapporteur for Violence Against Women on online violence against women.

An understanding of online gender-based violence as part of the structure of cultural and social violence that women face is essential to finding solutions or to combat it. In this article Serene Lim delves into what could be feminist legal approaches to online GBV, the alleged opposition to free speech and the multi-generational work required to dismantle frameworks of patriarchal oppression…

In this article, Serene Lim takes a closer look at how questions of access to the internet relate to the struggles of indigenous people and their movement for rights. Rather than the top-down imposition of connectivity, projects for access should align with their social context and as part of their right to sustainable development and right to equal participation.

More than 1,500 business leaders, civil society advocates, policy makers, lawyers, bloggers, technologists, and users participated in RightsCon Brussels 2017 (March) and there were over 250 sessions related to human rights and technology. Serene Lim explores the ways in which inequity was addressed at the forum, and how exclusion and marginalisation were framed in various sessions.

The fact that the Internet allows women to be anonymous has greatly aided in increased freedom of expression as well as in combating sexual discrimination, violence as well as domestic abuse. Even with the points in favour of right to anonymity being far and wide, it is not seen as a priority in many countries. Human rights activists and the civil society are only beginning to acknowledge that…