Digital Feminism, Platform Activism, and Online Violence in a Time of Backlash
Guest Editor: Guiomar Rovira Sancho
Communication Papers vol. 15 (31)
Digital media platforms have profoundly transformed the ways feminist ideas, activism, and solidarities circulate across national and cultural contexts. Social media environments such as Instagram, X, TikTok, and YouTube enable new forms of feminist engagement that scholars describe as digital feminism, hashtag activism, and networked feminist movements (Mendes, Ringrose & Keller, 2019; Clark, 2016). Through these platforms, feminist actors mobilize publics, challenge patriarchal norms, and build transnational networks of resistance that extend beyond traditional activist infrastructures.
Digital media environments have facilitated highly visible feminist campaigns such as #MeToo, #YesAllWomen, and #NiUnaMenos, demonstrating how networked communication can transform individual testimonies into collective political action (Jackson, Bailey & Welles, 2020; Mendes et al., 2019; Baer, 2016). These movements illustrate the emergence of what Papacharissi (2015) conceptualizes as affective publics, in which digitally mediated emotions and narratives contribute to political mobilization and collective identity formation.
At the same time, digital platforms are not neutral infrastructures. Platform architectures, algorithmic recommendation systems, and commercial logics shape the visibility, circulation, and reception of feminist discourse (Gillespie, 2018; van Dijck, Poell & de Waal, 2018). Feminist communication within digital environments operates within the broader dynamics of platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017) and surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), where visibility and engagement are governed by algorithmic logics that privilege particular forms of content, emotional expression, and engagement metrics. Ruha Benjamin’s concept of the “New Jim Code” highlights how discriminatory technological designs can reproduce and amplify existing racial and social hierarchies through seemingly neutral systems of data and automation.
Within these contexts, feminist activism frequently encounters tensions between empowerment, commodification, and backlash. As Banet-Weiser (2018) argues, contemporary media cultures are characterized by the coexistence of popular feminism and popular misogyny, where feminist messages circulate widely while also triggering intensified anti-feminist reactions. Similarly, Gill (2007, 2016) has shown how postfeminist sensibilities shape contemporary media cultures, influencing how feminist discourse becomes simultaneously visible and depoliticized within neoliberal media environments.
Recent scholarship also highlights the geopolitical and colonial dimensions of digital infrastructures. Data colonialism has been described as a new form of extractive power that reinforces global inequalities and produces forms of epistemic violence against knowledges and communities from the Global South (Ricaurte, 2019). Trans-hack-feminist and technopolitical collectives have increasingly denounced these dynamics while proposing alternative technological imaginaries grounded in autonomy, care, and collective governance (Briones and Rovira, 2024). At the same time, the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence has become a key site of feminist critique, with scholars and activists advocating for situated, accountable, and plural approaches to technological design that challenge the techno-universalism of corporate platforms (Ricaurte and Jasso, 2023).
Online spaces can therefore simultaneously foster feminist solidarity while amplifying harassment, misogyny, and organized anti-feminist backlash (Jane, 2016; Mantilla, 2015). Online harassment and gendered abuse have become increasingly pervasive, particularly targeting women and gender-diverse people who participate in political, activist, and journalistic fields (Nadim & Fladmoe, 2021). These dynamics are unfolding within a broader global context marked by the rise of authoritarian and far-right movements, increasing militarization and war, and coordinated digital campaigns aimed at discrediting feminist, LGBTQ+, and anti-racist movements (Noble, 2018). In this environment, feminist digital activism is forced to continuously reconfigure its strategies, infrastructures, and forms of solidarity in order to resist both platform governance and organized reactionary attacks.
The current moment therefore raises urgent questions about the possibilities and limits of platform-mediated feminist politics. How are feminist movements adapting to changing digital infrastructures, algorithmic governance, and the consolidation of platform power? In what ways are feminist actors confronting online violence, disinformation, and coordinated backlash? How do feminist technopolitical practices imagine alternative digital futures beyond the extractive logics of platform capitalism?
This special issue, guest edited by Guiomar Rovira Sancho, invites scholars to critically explore how feminist activism unfolds within contemporary platform cultures and digital media environments. We particularly welcome contributions that examine how feminist actors navigate the ambivalent conditions of visibility, vulnerability, and resistance in networked spaces.
Possible TopicsWe welcome theoretical and empirical contributions addressing (but not limited to):
- Digital feminist movements and hashtag activism beyond #MeToo
- Feminist responses to online harassment, misogyny, and gendered disinformation
- Far-right digital cultures, anti-feminist backlash, and platform politics
- Feminist technopolitics, transhackfeminism, and alternative infrastructures
- Platform governance, algorithmic bias, and feminist critiques of AI
- Data colonialism, digital extractivism, and feminist epistemologies from the Global South
- Feminist activism in contexts of war, authoritarianism, and political polarization
- Affective publics, digital storytelling, and feminist memory practices
- The commodification of feminism and the tensions of popular feminism
- Intersectional and transnational perspectives on digital feminist activism
Submissions may engage with key debates in digital feminism, feminist media studies, platform studies, and critical data studies. Contributions may draw on the work of scholars whose research has shaped the analysis of feminist politics within contemporary media and technological environments, including but not limited to:
- Sarah Banet-Weiser
- Kaitlynn Mendes
- Jessalynn Keller
- Rosalind Gill
- Ruha Benjamin
- Paola Ricaurte
Authors are encouraged to mobilize and critically engage with concepts such as:
- popular feminism and popular misogyny
- hashtag feminism and networked feminist movements
- feminist visibility politics
- affective publics and digitally mediated emotions
- feminist counterpublics and alternative digital publics
- online misogyny, harassment, and anti-feminist backlash
- platform governance, algorithmic power, and data politics
- data colonialism and decolonial approaches to digital infrastructures
- feminist technopolitics and critical perspectives on AI
Important Dates
Full paper submission deadline: 15 October 2026
Publication of the issue: December 2026
Guest Editor
Guiomar Rovira Sancho - University of Girona
guiomar.rovira@udg.edu
Managing Editor
Hasan Gürkan – Communication Papers, University of Girona
hasan.gurkan@udg.edu
Submission Guidelines
Manuscripts should follow the Communication Papersauthor guidelines and be submitted through the journal’s online submission system. All submissions will undergo a double-blind peer review process.
Articles should be written in English or Spanishand should typically range between 6,000–8,000 words, including references.
Keywords
Digital feminism • Platform activism • Hashtag feminism • Feminist counterpublics • Online misogyny • Networked activism
Key References
Baer, H. (2016). Redoing feminism: Digital activism, body politics, and neoliberalism. Feminist Media Studies, 16(1), 17–34.
Banet-Weiser, S. (2018). Empowered: Popular feminism and popular misogyny. Duke University Press.
Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim code. Polity Press.
Briones, F. & Rovira, G. (2025) Women Activists Caretaking Digital Networks, in Kotaman & Şener (ed.) Feminist Activism in the Digital Era: Cultural Perspectives. UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Pp. 143-155.
Clark, R. (2016). “Hope in a hashtag”: The discursive activism of #WhyIStayed. Feminist Media Studies, 16(5), 788–804.
Gill, R. (2007). Gender and the media. Polity Press.
Gill, R. (2016). Postfeminism and the new cultural life of feminism. Diffractions, 6, 1–8.
Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. Yale University Press.
Ging, D., & Siapera, E. (2018). Special issue on online misogyny. Feminist Media Studies, 18(4), 515–524.
Jackson, S. J., Bailey, M., & Welles, B. F. (2020). #HashtagActivism: Networks of race and gender justice. MIT Press.
Jane, E. A. (2016). Misogyny online: A short (and brutish) history. SAGE.
Mantilla, K. (2015). Gendertrolling: How misogyny went viral. Praeger.
Mendes, K., Ringrose, J., & Keller, J. (2019). Digital feminist activism: Girls and women fight back against rape culture.Oxford University Press.
Nadim, M., & Fladmoe, A. (2021). Silencing women? Gender and online harassment. Social Science Computer Review, 39(2), 245–258.
Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. NYU Press.
Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics. Oxford University Press.
Ricaurte, P. (2019). Data epistemologies, the coloniality of power, and resistance. Television & New Media, 20(4), 350–365.
Ricaurte, P., & Jasso, M. (2022). Inteligencia artificial feminista: Hacia una agenda de investigación en América Latina y el Caribe. Feminist AI Research Network.
Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. Polity Press.
Van Dijck, J., Poell, T., & de Waal, M. (2018). The platform society: Public values in a connective world. Oxford University Press.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power.PublicAffairs.
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