“Digital space is a network of domination”: interview with Ketsia Mutombo and Laure Salmona

In the early days of the web there was the promise of life-saving freedom of expression. As if the web had the power to erase inequalities and give everyone the opportunity to make their voice heard.

You didn’t have to wait long to be disillusioned. The Internet and platforms have proven to be a perfect amplifier of hate speech, a fertile ground for commercial logic, a fuel for violence that intimidates and excludes, especially against people belonging to minority groups. Like a magnifying mirror of the oppressions already existing in the real world, transposed into the virtual world and mobilized for eminently political purposes.

“ How can we escape the web of domination and ensure that this territory of all possibilities does not remain the playground of male domination? » ask the authors and activists Ketsia Mutombo and Laure Salmona in their new work, « Politicizing cyberviolence: An intersectional reading of gender inequalities on the Internet », published on 14 September by Editions du Cavalier Bleu. Encounter.

Cross-interview with Ketsia Mutombo and Laure Salmona, co-founders of Feminists Against Cyberharassment and authors of “Politicizing cyberviolence: an intersectional reading of gender inequalities on the Internet”.

To miss. Why this book?

Laura Salmona. We have been fighting within the collective for almost eight years Feminists against cyber harassment and this work is the product of our struggles and commitments. It seemed important to us to write on the topic from a political and intersectional angle: faced with the advent of digital technology and the improvement of generative artificial intelligence, it appears urgent and fundamental to analyze the political project hidden behind cyberviolence.

Ketsia Mutombo. This book allows us to have a fixed and unique support for our struggles. A way to present the sources of the oppressions we fight against.

What is “gender-based cyber violence”?

Laura Salmona. Cyber ​​violence affects women, girls and LGBTQI+ people. Their motivations are closely linked to heterosexist gender stereotypes, rape culture, shame, hypersexualization, objectification and control of the female body. It can take specific forms such as non-consensual distribution of intimate content or sexist and sexual cyber harassment, but all online violence can take on a gendered character.

We prefer to talk about gender cyberviolence rather than cybersexism, because women and LGBTQI+ people suffer other dominations, which mix with sexism, when they find themselves at the intersection of multiple oppressions! We also believe that this slogan tends to overlook the fact that online sexism is nothing more than an extension of what happens in the material world and that only by changing the entire society will it be possible to eradicate this violence. .

Ketsia Mutombo. Gender-based cyberviolence encompasses all violent acts committed on and through the Internet with the aim of maintaining heterosexist hegemony. This paradigm requires that men and boys (heads of families in reality or in power) are obeyed in all circumstances, that their physical, sexual, economic or symbolic violence is always legitimized and that women and girls are this mass service. Who, in the digital space, should accept to give up their safety, their physical, sexual or thought autonomy. Accepting all kinds of interactions, answering intrusive questions, accepting how ” digital presence game »threats and other crimes…

In heterocissexism, two sexes are allowed, man/woman, with well-defined and hermetic social functions and capabilities. LGBTQI+ people who relativize these gender roles are enormously threatened by the perpetrators of this gender-based cyber violence.

What do you mean by “politicizing” cyber violence and why do you think it is essential to do so?

Ketsia Mutombo. Politicizing cyberviolence is equivalent to doing what we do in our associative action: explaining and denouncing their function in blantriarchal societies.¹. Explain that this violence, in the digital space, is destined to maintain the dominance of some social groups and are not simple mistakes of young people, or understandable blunders in a space where the pseudonym can” give wings “. Cyberviolence is a further means of enslaving people belonging to social groups designated as “ dominate »: women, intersex and trans people, people with disabilities, non-white people, immigrants, etc.

Laura Salmona. Cyberviolence is still too often reduced to violent interpersonal interactions that could be stopped” simply by turning off the computer » or to a problem related to school bullying that only affects adolescents. This ignores the systemic nature of this violence and the fact that they have become political tools at the service of the dominant classes, real weapons used to muzzle women and people belonging to minority groups who wish to emancipate themselves from the unenviable place assigned to them in the inside a capitalist system. , sexist, racist, LGBTQIphobic and ableist society.

Through what processes do the Internet and social platforms fuel dominant structures, further reinforcing inequalities?

Laura Salmona. Digital technologies are not neutral, nor is the use made of them made. Like public space, the platforms that make up cyberspace are often designed by men and for men. It’s no small feat that Twitter (now conceived by Mark Zuckerberg as a platform to evaluate the physique of Harvard students.

The Internet is a pixelated reflection of society, offline and online intertwine to form a continuum of oppressions: all the relations of domination we see in the tangible world will be found in digital space. Sometimes they are even amplified, since the algorithms that govern the platforms tend to widen inequalities and make hate speech even more visible by amplifying its reach. As for the freedom of expression claimed by platform leaders, it is variable, as they are often more cautious in moderating sexist hate speech than in moderating sexist hate speech. shadowban content creators who talk about sexual health. Furthermore, cyber violence threatens the freedom of expression of the social groups that are victims of it as this violence pushes them to abandon social networks and self-censor, thus depriving them of their voice.

Ketsia Mutombo. The Internet, due to its functions (which allow us to go beyond physical proximity, to make the amount of data exchanged almost unlimited and to expand communication networks), is a formidable space in the event of violence, because it is difficult to contain. And content hosting platforms create features and interfaces that promote the virality of subversive and often violent content. Like Twitter, with the column “ for you » where from now on the tweets with a lot of engagement from our subscribers appear (even without interaction). Or Facebook, where posts that friends like appear in our feed…

The business model of these digital platforms is online advertising (AdTech) and they do everything to enhance the content that will keep users connected. Combined with insufficient moderation and sometimes with a certain ideology claimed by the management committees of these sites, cyber violence can thrive because its authors transmit it through strictly viral content.

Why is it essential to have an intersectional reading of these issues?

Ketsia Mutombo. Intersectionality is a framework for understanding structural violence, among others, created by philosophers, political scientists, and left-wing activists. But its greater transmission, in the digital space, has made it possible to demonstrate that identities bring with them very concrete conditions of life, which are privileges when they are advantageous. It was therefore possible for many women, Afrofeminists first and foremost, to describe the deployment of oppression in daily life starting from very concrete examples.

Intersectionality is a tool accessible to many audiences and allows one to describe complex situations without essentializing the position of victim or beneficiary of oppression. It allowed us to generalize practices of self-reflexivity, therefore to always question ourselves to know if we were not at a certain moment a vector of violence.

Laura Salmona. Because we must leave no one behind and the social project that lies behind the systemic nature of cyber violence against women and minorities is not just a sexist project: it aims to oppress and deprive entire sectors of society of their rights. It is essential to share our perceptions to better understand the different prisms of oppression. This is what will allow a real convergence of struggles, conducive to the construction of a broad front of resistance.

What lines of action remain to “reclaim this space of struggle”?

Ketsia Mutombo. It continues to be there. Have accounts, comment on news, produce content, create digital connections. But we also need to create more confidential digital spaces, with trusted people where we can let go, talk without fear of attack from the dominant, and retreat there during times of exhaustion. Then, paradoxically, translating these digital commitments into tangible areas: joining an association on issues we defend online, creating an IRL reading club, even just meeting the people we exchange with online (without injunction and when this is possible) will strengthen this digital anchoring. This space is ours, we describe it in our book and we will continue to modulate it.

Laura Salmona. The network of domination that is digital space is dense. And there is almost nothing other than the struggle that liberates: we must organize ourselves, campaign, online and offline, to break these systems of oppression, for greater equality. We must also force platforms to be more transparent and ethical and invest in less monitored spaces, where we will not be reduced to raw material that tech giants can exploit to extract masses of personal data and resell it to the highest bidder. The fight against gender cyberviolence cannot and must not be limited to its judicialization.

“ Politicizing cyberviolence: An intersectional reading of gender inequalities on the Internet » appears in Editions du Cavalier Bleu on 14 September 2023.

*Definition taken from the glossary of the book: “ Blantriarchy defines the patriarchy promoted by white societies. A patriarchy that will also have white supremacist objectives and which, in addition to misogyny, will integrate racism, white birth control and imperialism. It will not only postulate the domination of men over women and children, but rather the domination of white men over all other social groups. “.

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