The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) has announced the 2014 ‘Take Back the Tech!’ campaign. The campaign which aims to highlight issues on violence against women will be launched on July 21, 2014.
APC intends to share research findings that show a lack of commitment to women’s human rights issues from renowned social media platforms specifically Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The results from research will highlight a lack of transparency, a lack of available data, barriers to reporting, reactive instead of proactive changes on issues of sexual and other violence against women online.
According to the statement issued by APC, “we’re all too familiar with the death and rape threats women receive on Twitter, Facebook pages devoted to violence against women and sexual and violent responses to the YouTube videos of women in fields dominated by men. In fact, 61% of internet-related cases on our English-language map of tech-related violence against women involved these and other popular social media platforms.”
The explained that though these sites have made some effort to respond to user concerns but their actions is not sufficient to address the problem of violence against women. APC said, “violence stifles freedom of expression, and we want solutions that promote our rights to freedom of speech and freedom from violence. So we’re targeting the big three.”
APC is expected to share a campaign kit that will include tweets, articles, preliminary research findings and graphics before the main push will take place from July 21 to 25, 2014.
The organizers are calling on the public to support the campaign by connecting with local, national and regional media on this issue, by posting graphics on websites and writing an article or blog post.
For inquiries, kindly contact Sara Baker at sara.baker@takebackthetech.net
