The backlash against the gains won by feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements are manifesting in digital spaces through a complex array of socio-technical-political mechanisms involving political actors, technology companies, and new affordances for harm. Digital systems increasingly entrench and amplify gender inequalities with minimal accountability. But in these same spaces gender justice advocates are countering the backlash, showing how it is possible to carve out and create new technological trajectories, rooted in care and inclusive futures.
This working paper shows how recent power shifts in socio/digital relations reflect, facilitate, and amplify a broader backlash agenda. Situating its analysis in an era of ‘big tech authoritarianism’ marked by the merging of state and technology power, three interlinked shifts in socio-digital realities are delineated: the rise of ‘compulsory digitisation’, the persistence of structural gender inequalities in digital access and skills, and the rapid growth of AI, which risks amplifying bias and enabling technology-facilitated gender-based violence at scale.
Drawing on country-level research from the Countering Backlash programme, this paper shows how three backlash mechanisms – direct attacks that silence women, an erosion of commitments to diversity, equality, and inclusion, and discourse capture – are mirrored online. The paper finally turns to strategies for countering backlash, documenting how feminists build coalitions and safe spaces, engage men, respond rapidly to disinformation, and pursue legal and technical remedies including ‘Safety by Design’ approaches for digital platforms, emerging regulatory approaches, and feminist technological innovation.