Online hate speech, harassment, stalking and death threats are trapping too many vocal women and LGTBI persons into a contradictory situation where in one hand, as Internet is crucial for their work, in order to coordinate actions or enable a wider reach out, they are also increasingly expose to surveillance and/or punitive actions. All those factors have driven to a situation where Internet is not a safe space and where it is common to see feminist and activist work being deleted, (self)censored, and actively prevented of being seen, heard or read. Logically, those trends diminish the freedom of expression and privacy rights of the people targeted. Tackling those dangers has become higher in the agenda of many feminist and LGTBI organizations and networks and has driven to an active panorama of initiatives, collective strategies and new approaches to privacy and digital security including a gender and cultural diversity perspective. Building upon past events such as the TransHackFeminist convergence, Autonomy (im)possible, Darmstadt delegation, the Feminist Server Summit, Ministry of hacking and the Gender and technology Institute, our invited participants will discuss from a cyberfeminist perspective what is happening online and how we can reclaim and reshape a feminist internet.

The next panel discussion I attended was presented by three women from the Tactical Technology Collective. Much of it highlighted digital campaigning around women’s and LGBT issues, some of it hilarious and disturbing. Certainly disruptive. This video was shown by Maya Ganesh and produced in 2013 by All India Bakchod, which proves that men can also be feminists. More importantly it demonstrates how social media can be used to get attention for important causes. As the Tactical Tech panel unfolded I was struck by the high-seriousness of the discussion. And at the same time some parts were very LULZY. There is something about satire and hacktivism that works well together and always has. The Cult of the Dead Cow were masters of this technique, and it was definitely picked up by LulzSec and Anonymous. Satire has a way of approaching uncomfortable truths and is often more interesting to the press than receiving traditional press releases. Campaigners take note. One of the other great presentations at this panel was from Ada Stolz of the Peng Collective. Ms. Stolz was a core member of the Zero Trollerance campaign that was - and remains to be - absolutely brilliant.

Over the past years, an increasing attention has been directed to online hate speech, harassment, stalking and death threats launched by non state actors, but also by governments, against women human rights activists and LGTBI people, and their collaborators. More broadly, misogyny, homophobia and bigotry also intertwine to oppose and silent women engaging into technological fields such as engineering, computing or digital security. The following discussion will invite different cyberfeminists to exchange about those trends and present current promising initiatives and collective strategies that are confronting and overcoming those issues.