Designing Industry Action on Online Abuse
Globally, almost 40% of women report experiencing online violence, including threats and abusive language. For young women and girls, the risk is even higher.
The World Wide Web Foundation was a non-profit co-founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Rosemary Leith to advance a free and open web for all. Through its Tech Policy Design Lab, the Foundation focused on one of the web’s most urgent design and governance challenges: the violence and abuse disproportionately experienced by women online.
Working with Feminist Internet, CraigWalker designed and facilitated a global policy design process for online gender-based violence (OGBV). Across a series of workshops, participants from technology companies, civil society, academia and regulatory bodies developed scenario-based prototypes grounded in the lived experiences of highly visible women online. The work was translated into practical recommendations for content curation and abuse reporting, forming the basis for public commitments from Google, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok at the 2021 UN Generation Equality Forum.
The project was recognised with Best Design Strategy at the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Design Awards.
The report can be read and downloaded here: OGBV Report - June 2021
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The project in numbers
3Global workshops
35Countries represented
11prototypes translated into platform recommendations
Bringing the system into the room
Online gender-based violence sits across product, policy, governance and lived experience. To work with that complexity, CraigWalker and Feminist Internet designed and facilitated a series of global online workshops with more than 120 participants from 35 countries, including representatives from technology companies, civil society, academia and regulatory bodies. Participants worked in small, multi-stakeholder groups to develop scenario-based prototypes. Each scenario was anchored in the experiences of highly visible women online, including politicians, journalists, activists and influencers, with attention to how abuse is shaped by identity, visibility and context. The scenarios tested how platforms could better support content curation and abuse reporting. The process moved the conversation from general concern to specific changes platforms could make.
Turning prototypes into platform commitments
The workshops produced 11 prototypes exploring how platforms could better support women’s safety online. Concepts included “Viral Mode” to manage sudden spikes in visibility, chatbot-assisted reporting support and community-enabled moderation tools. CraigWalker and Feminist Internet translated these concepts into recommendations across two platform priorities: giving women more control over content curation, and improving reporting systems when abuse occurs. Published through a report and microsite, the work gave product and policy teams a practical way to move from acknowledgement to action, helping shape public commitments from four of the world’s largest technology platforms.
