Revisiting Digital Policy through a Feminist Lens

The main objective of this paper is to review and map major debates and contributions from scholars, researchers, civil society organizations, and advocacy experts linked to the need to integrate feminist perspectives and approaches in the development and implementation of digital policies. For instance, calls for а feminist lens on digital policies focus more on protecting human rights, ensuring the human-centered design of products and tools, eliminating bias and intersectional inequalities, and engaging marginalized and vulnerable groups. Hence, a sub-objective of the study is to identify fields and topics emerging from problems and gaps recognized by civil society and advocacy experts, where further research, practical efforts, legislation, and policies are needed. Through an in-depth examination of state-of-the-art academic literature and analytical and policy reports, we explore lacunae related to content moderation and reporting tools on social media platforms, regulation, and digital rights policies. We review and discuss established policies and relevant reports published by several big technology companies addressing topics such as online violence, hate speech, harassment, diversity, digital accessibility, etc. The paper mentions the expectations related to the Digital Services Act and the AI Act adopted at the European Union level and how these instruments could advance a more inclusive and feminist approach to creating digital products, services, and policies. Lastly, we explore the possibility of a broad framework of indicators or benchmarks to be used to monitor the integration of a feminist perspective in digital policies, specifically in terms of preventing online illegal or harmful phenomena, improving content moderation, and empowering vulnerable individuals and groups. The framework could help ensure better reporting by tech companies in compliance with their existing obligations and support evidence-based and data-informed policy- and decision-making.