It’s not news that 2026 has started off as a rough year for feminist movements, after several years of backlash to progress for gender equality, human rights, justice and peace. From Grok AI’s digital violence against women, to the escalation of global insecurity led by the disruptor-in-chief in the White House. As big tech continues to prioritize profit over people and planet, and support for authoritarianism – how do we navigate the digital landscape today? How do we use the very tools that are funding the disruption of the movements we are working to support? When trust in media, research and experts is falling, can we reimagine what feminist digital media looks like?
In January 2013, I quit my job to focus on building an organization around my blog that had taken off the year before. The blog grew into a media platform with members and contributors from over 50 countries – a global meeting place for stories, perspectives and insights from experts and organizations that work with equality, rights and justice.
In that first official year of Girls’ Globe (the name of my original blog and the name this platform continues to have), we were connected with grassroots activists and global leaders within this space – thanks to social media. In 2013 even Melinda Gates started following me on Twitter. A couple of years after the Arab Spring demonstrations had given hope to the use of digital media to topple regimes – I was experiencing first hand how technological development could be used to scale up movement building for equality and rights around the world.
Photo Credit: Abate Damte
We were hopeful that the rights of women, minorities and other vulnerable groups could be improved, with the help of our digital connectedness and the opportunities to hold decision makers to account.
Girls’ Globe became a team of feminists who worked with editing, community building and amplification. We reached readers from every corner of the globe and grew into a trusted media partner for global conferences, private sponsors and UN organizations. To act as a microphone for women and girls around the world and those leading the change became our main focus.
Over the past seven years, we’ve seen the digital landscape change and develop in the opposite direction. This change has been financed by profit-maximizing tech companies and the billionaires behind them, driven by the algorithms’ filter bubbles we’ve found ourselves in. Even before 2020, we noticed how Girls’ Globe didn’t have the reach it once had in social media. Our work and the voices we wanted to amplify were down-prioritized in these online public squares, where paid advertisers were flooding the space.
Today, we see how 40% of young American men trust misogynist influencers online, and that young people are more anti-feminist than previous generations. Social media is flooded with propaganda, fake news and conspiracy theories – leading to, among many other things, measles outbreaks and increased violence against women.
My interest in Big Tech’s culpability in the anti-rights movement grew at the time of whistleblower Frances Haugen’s disclosure of The Facebook Files. These documents showed that the company was well aware of the harms it created and chose to do nothing, or at least very little, about it. This included the company’s impact on girls mental health and allowing criminal networks to use it’s tools to organize.
The digital landscape is in a completely different place today than when I started Girls’ Globe.
The work to understand and analyze this digital landscape is essential to build movements of change for equality, rights, justice and peace today. This year, I am embarking on a journey with many other feminist leaders, experts, media professionals and communicators to reimagine global feminist media.
How can we best support leaders and movements for positive change today, when these spaces are increasingly undemocratic? How can we contribute with important sources in a digital information system that is flooding with fake news, propoganda and biased AI-generated material? How do we keep going without falling into the grip of big tech, with tactics like sensationalism or click-bait?
This year, I hope we can answer these questions, and based on those answers we will be making changes here. In a digital landscape where we see journalists, experts and researches get attacked, suppressed or discredited by dubious sources, we need to stand up for equality, rights and justice and the importance of trustworthy media, based in facts.
Do you want to contribute to the future of feminist digital media?
Girls’ Globe is an independent media platform and currently unfunded. Please consider donating to Girls’ Globe, for us to continue to do this work and answer these essential questions for the sake of equality, rights, justice and peace. Make a one time donation here or consider becoming a monthly sponsor.
