Digital media, the fighting space for women's rights

The denunciation of systemic violence against women has also evolved in movements in South Korea: on 17 May 2016, a young 23-year-old woman was murdered by a stranger in the public toilet next to Gangnam metro station in Seoul. A feminist group opens the Twitter account @0517am1 and invites people to leave a post-it note and a chrysanthemum at the site of the murder, launching the hashtags #GangnamMurderMan and #BathroomMurderer so that women could publicly share their experiences of violence. Prompted by messages on social media, women of all ages organised a small event in Gangnam that soon turned into a permanent protest site, replicated in other cities across Korea. With the Gangnam murder mobilisations, the digital activism of Korean feminist movements gained new political strength by becoming visible in the public space and linking the online and offline dimensions.

The following year, 2017, was the year of the cinematic #MeToo, which, from Hollywood around the world, definitively sanctioned the 'agency' and relationship power of digital media for women. In the wake of the #MeToo (3,228,241 posts on Instagram), more recently, Spanish feminist movements denounced abuse in Spanish football by launching the hashtag #SeAcabó following the non-consensual kiss given by Luis Rubiales, president (now suspended) of the Spanish Football Federation, to the footballer Jennifer Hermoso. First appearing in Hermoso's complaint post, the hashtag generated a series of responses not only from teammates but from the entire sporting world. Helping to change its rules and culture.

A virtuous result, but not a foregone conclusion since, in the virtual dimension dominated by algorithms, the risk is that of self-referentiality and the creation of 'niches' in which the message echoes among networks aligned on the same values without spreading beyond the bubble. How do we overcome this danger? By producing a new culture, capable of transcending the confines of the space in which women situate themselves, and by developing a public discourse that promotes democratising actions from below.

This is what women in Iran are doing by also using digital media to drive the country's freedom. While the Iranian government plans to use facial recognition technology on public transport to identify women who do not wear the hijab, Iranian girls continue to specialise in Stem disciplines - 70 per cent of female graduates are in the field - and to make their skills available to disseminate, filter and repurpose the narrative of what has become an international movement: Woman, Life, Freedom.

In a country where the media is under tight government control, social media is a lifeline for citizens, providing them with access to impartial information and the opportunity to document what is happening: in the investigation opened by the United Nations, the videos and images shared by the protesters were used to shed light on the abuses committed by the Iranian police forces and authorities who, already during the demonstrations against the fuel price increase in 2019, had closed access to the web altogether and, on the occasion of the demonstrations following Amini's death, intensified control over the web by applying a digital curfew and preventing access to WhatsApp, Instagram, Skype, Viber and LinkedIn.

This strategy was also reiterated in Gaza, where attacks last October cut off internet and electricity in the Palestinian enclave, preventing the Strip's residents from showing the world what is happening on the ground. "I don't know how long I will live, so I just want to share this memory of mine here before I die. I will not leave my home, come what may. My biggest regret is not having kissed a boy. He died two days ago': these are the messages one can read from Gaza on Queering the map, an online map where all LGBTQ+ people can anonymously share significant moments of their lives and their journey of self-understanding by placing a pin on geographical places that have special meaning for them.

Storytelling to tell the world, beyond the chronicle of traditional media: this is how the digital becomes a space to be inhabited, no longer 'divorced' from reality but capable of shaping it.