With technology becoming a significant space of feminist negotiations and activism over the past two decades, Verity Trott’s book Feminist Activism and Platform Politics (published by Routledge in 2022) fills an important gap in looking at the technology that allows feminists to spread their message but also inhibits and thwarts their efforts.

The words ‘Platform Politics’ are the pillars that Trott’s book revolves around since she turns our attention to the way internet platforms become complex technological ecosystems mediated by patriarchal, male-dominated organizations and their drive for profit. It is also in this politically-charged ecosystem that feminists strive to cultivate transnational feminist networks and amplify each other’s voices.

Chapter 1 starts with Trott looking at one of the first digital feminist awareness campaigns named ‘Hollaback!’ which took a stance against street harassment that women faced. The campaign started in 2005 when Thao Nguyen, a young woman in New York, posted a picture of a famous restaurant owner masturbating on the subway on the image-sharing website Flickr. The shock value of the picture posted on a public platform and the police’s inaction over lack of evidence led to more women sharing and commenting on the photo along with writing their own experiences about sexual harassment at the hands of the same man. The campaign gained more legitimacy and followers as more and more women started to talk about the sexual harassment they faced in public places. Even though the headquarters of the campaign were in New York, local chapters of Hollaback! grew in different places of the world – empowering women to give their voice to the harassment they were subjected to. Chapter 2 takes a deeper dive into Hollaback!’s mapping application which essentially depends on Google’s mapping technology and is subject to Google’s data practices and politics. Its mobile application was also subject to approval from the Apple iOS store and Google’s Play Store – making it vulnerable to the policies of these digital giants that do not share the same feminist vision. Hollaback! itself suffers from the problem of Western-centric colonial practices led by elite white women from the Global North, that suppresses the voices of the women from local chapters situated beyond the West impeding the creation of a truly intersectional, transnational feminist network.

Most of the campaigns described in chapters 3 and 4 such as #TakeDownJulienBlanc and #EndViolenceAgainstWomen trace their origins in and around the Silicon Valley in North America, a limitation that Trott is also aware of and critiques using Patricia Hill Collins’ theory of ‘Matrix of Domination’. Trott also differentiates between reactionary, awareness-raising protest and a more sustained, formal activist organization and how the internet, while seemingly equal, can also privilege one voice over the other.

Chapters 5 and 6 looks at social media platforms and how they act as a breeding ground for toxic hyper-masculine and misogynist entities, such as Tyler Durden and Julien Blanc who were self-proclaimed ‘Pick-up Artists’ advising men on how to seduce women. Some of Blanc’s ideas and ideas of other “artists” like him were unapologetically violent and formed a worrying part of rape culture that was spread across the internet. Trott looks at how feminist activists formed a huge campaign to stop Blanc’s tour around the world through social media platforms. Along the process, some of these activists found that they were banned by Facebook because of content moderation policies while Julien Blanc was still allowed to exist and post freely on the platform. In such a situation, many of them had to depend on Twitter to keep spreading the message because of Twitter’s flexible moderation policies – however, these are the same policies which often exposed them to violent trolls and hate speech.

Trott also looks at the platforms 4chan and 8chan as alt-tech alliances mostly for men who bond over misogyny and their ‘incel’ (involuntarily celibate) nature. These platforms first came to notice after the New Zealand Christchurch shootings as well as other mass shootings in North America. Trott notes that 8chan as a website was built after users complained about the existing platform 4chan of moderating content too strictly and not allowing enough freedom to post whatever they wanted.

Trott describes her methodology as ‘digital ethnography’ which is different from ‘social media ethnography’ – for her, the focus is not solely on the social media platforms and websites where these negotiations happen but also on the “structure and ecology of a range of digital platforms including web infrastructure and support services”. Therefore, in chapter 5, when Trott looks at how large feminist campaigns often happen through the petition-based website change.org, she looks at how the website also acts as a profit-driven agent – contrary to the passive image that it projects as simply a middle-man between petitioners and signatories. Change.org actively promotes some petitions over others in the hopes of new subscribers to the platform – an act that can actively harm a feminist cause or lead to its success. Thus, for Trott, event management platforms, donation services, email marketing and web hosting services as well as domain registrars are also important actors of the platform politics who feminists and digital media scholars must also engage with carefully and cautiously.

‘Feminist Activism and Platform Politics’ will find a place in the bookshelves of digital media scholars who are interested in gender, as well as feminist activists who rely on the internet and media platforms for their work. The book also offers a strong review of the existing literature that makes it interesting for non-academics as well. Through a thorough investigation of the technological aspects of these platforms and how feminists negotiate this tricky terrain, this book offers us important lessons about the internet and feminist activism.

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Sukanya Bhattacharya is a PhD student of Sociology at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.