Deplatforming Misogyny

Written by: Cynthia Khoo

This report examines digital platform liability for technology-facilitated gender-based violence, abuse, and harassment (“TFGBV”).

Digital platforms play a central role in how we interact and share information with one another, express ourselves, build community, politically mobilize, and participate in public life. They have also simultaneously provided new and efficient mechanisms for abusive users to engage in TFGBV, such as through doxing, stalking, trolling, launching coordinated harassment campaigns, and distributing intimate images without consent. Platform companies’ design features, business models, content moderation policies, and related decisions contribute to perpetuating a hostile environment for women, girls, and members of historically marginalized and systemically oppressed groups in society. This impacts their right to freedom of expression and their right to equality. 

This report contains 14 recommendations for federal government action and legislative reform. The recommendations include imposing legal obligations and, in some cases, liability on digital platforms for TFGBV committed by a user. Our recommendations are grounded in six guiding principles, including the need to centre substantive equality in platform regulation, and ensuring expedient, practical, and accessible remedies for those targeted by TFGBV. 

Download the Executive Summary, Recommendations, and Full Report below. The Executive Summary and Recommendations are also available in French.

This publication was created as part of LEAF’s Technology-Facilitated Violence (TFV) Project. The TFV Project brings together feminist lawyers and academics to imagine legal responses to TFV against women and gender-diverse people that are informed by equality principles.