Driving Industry Action on Online Abuse
Globally, almost 40% of women report experiencing online violence, including threats and abusive language. This number is even higher among young women and girls.
The World Wide Web Foundation, a non-profit co-founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Rosemary Leith, advocates for a free and open web for all. With the launch of its Tech Policy Design Lab, the Foundation set its first focus on tackling the violence and abuse disproportionately experienced by women online.
Craig Walker, in partnership with Feminist Internet, was tasked with designing and facilitating a series of Online Gender-Based Violence (OGBV) workshops and transforming the outputs into actionable recommendations. These formed the basis for public commitments by four of the world’s largest tech companies—Google, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok—at the 2021 UN Generation Equality Forum.
This work has been recognised with an award for Best Design Strategy at the 2021 Victorian Premiers Design Awards.
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The project in numbers
3Global workshops
35Countries represented
1111 Actionable recommendations in 1 report
Designing with Stakeholders, Not Just for Them
To generate meaningful solutions to online gender-based violence, Craig Walker and Feminist Internet designed and facilitated a series of global, online workshops. These brought together over 120 participants from 35 countries—including representatives from tech companies, civil society, academia, and regulatory bodies. Working in small, multi-stakeholder groups, participants used design thinking methods to develop scenario-based prototypes. Each scenario was anchored in the lived experiences of highly visible women online—such as politicians, journalists, activists, and influencers—and explored how digital platforms could better support content curation and abuse reporting. The workshops prioritised co-creation and practical outcomes, laying the groundwork for recommendations that tech companies could meaningfully act on.
A Practical Toolkit for Product Teams Tackling Online Abuse
The workshops produced over ten detailed prototypes that explored how digital platforms could better support women’s safety through improved content curation and abuse reporting tools. Concepts included features like “Viral Mode” to manage visibility during sudden spikes in attention, chatbot-assisted reporting support, and community-enabled moderation tools. These prototypes directly informed eight key recommendations, four each for content curation and reporting, which were published alongside a microsite and report. The resources were designed to inspire and equip product and policy teams within tech companies to take meaningful, user-informed action against online gender-based violence.
