The Internet Democracy Project and Point of View – with support from the Friedrich Naumann Foundation – are delighted to introduce My troll, our troll? Moving beyond individual action and towards structural change against online abuse. This is a two-day national event that seeks to collaboratively brainstorm and exchange thoughts, ideas, and plans, and propose feminist solutions to online abuse as a systemic problem.

Building upon work currently being developed by the Internet Democracy Project, we will be asking: what if we turned our feminist lens to online abuse, to consider it as a systemic issue that demands collective action? What could a coordinated feminist response that targets long-term change look like? Contribute?

This closed-door event is by invitation only.

SESSIONS

Day 1 – Tuesday, 20 November

9.45−11.00: The personal is political: a workshop session on shifting the lens from individual responses to feminist structural change for online abuse.

11.30−13.00: How to loiter online. Or: what structural shifts do we need to experience not merely safety, but pleasure and risk? A presentation, small group conversations, and plenary discussion.

14.00−15.30: Mobile phones: combat zones? A round of ​‘lightning talks’ and a plenary discussion on the specificities of mobile phone-based abuse as well as the specific challenges faced by those who mostly access the Internet through phones.

16.00−17.30: How far can networked solidarity go? #LoSHA, #MeToo, and the lessons we can learn: three interventions kick off a conversation among all, to end Day 1.

Day 2 – Wednesday, 21 November

09.30−10.30: Seeing with context: ideologies, narratives and online abuse. What do we know about patterns in abuse, and what lessons should we draw from there? Research findings, experiences and plenary discussion around what are emerging as systematic features of abuse and the importance of foregrounding intersectionality in our responses as a consequence.

10.30−11.30: Online abuse and the tyranny of the algorithm. When The Algorithm is the infrastructure, is liberation possible? A workshop session to explore.

12.00−13.00: Get intimate: How knowing your troll might help you take back control. A workshop session in which we try our hands at hacking abuse on Twitter by better understanding The Enemy!

14.00−15.00: #FeministsInAction Today: a round of ​‘lightning talks’ and a plenary on what we are already doing to push back against online abuse and claim our space online.

15.30−16.45: Better together: Where do we go from here, as movement(s)? A conversation about what, after two days of thinking together, we see as possible appropriate responses that need further exploration and how we can or should organise to make these happen.