The Challenge
When Ethiopian Mayor Adanech Abiebie woke to find her face on AI-generated intimate videos viewed 562,000 times within hours, she wasn’t experiencing an isolated incident—she was targeted by organized crime. Technology-facilitated gender-based violence (tfGBV) operates as a criminal enterprise across borders: the same networks creating political deepfakes also profit from blackmail targeting teen girls, dating app scams enabling assault, revenge porn monetization, and coordinated trolling silencing journalists and activists.
These operations share infrastructure: platforms, payment systems, operational playbooks. They are transnational, adaptive, increasingly automated. They are fighting a coordinated war. We respond with scattered defensive actions.
The invisibility is their weapon. Feminist movements see only fragments, responding to individual incidents without understanding the connected system behind them. Women’s rights organizations wait for platforms to respond to reports, rely on external cybersecurity firms they cannot afford, and use donor-funded tools they cannot maintain when funding ends. The result: permanent dependency, perpetual reaction, and criminal networks that continue thriving.
Our Approach
We’re building the world’s first feminist-led technical defense network. Through our Digital Guardian Network, beginning in Africa and expanding globally, we’re transforming frontline feminists into forensic investigators who don’t just document violence, but dismantle the infrastructure enabling it.
A four-stage pathway takes movements from digital self-defense to technical leadership:
- Defenders build foundations in threat detection and forensic evidence collection
- Advocates develop sophisticated response coordination and mobilization strategies
- Builders master AI tool creation for local language detection and community-designed solutions
- Mentors lead train-the-trainer programs, embedding capacity permanently in organizations
Our Feminist AI Sandbox provides the infrastructure: 700+ methodology guides, pre-trained language models for experimentation, indigenous language resources detecting weaponized terms that dominant-language algorithms miss, and collaborative development space where survivor expertise shapes every technical decision.
The Impact
This is a paradigm shift, not incremental improvement.
What this will look like in practice:
- Coordinated intelligence: When a troll network emerges in Nigeria, Guardians in Kenya, Senegal, and Tunisia receive early warnings within hours—deploying countermeasures before networks scale across borders.
- Technical sovereignty: Movements build their own AI detection systems for under-resourced languages, create evidence dossiers formatted for regulatory enforcement, and develop culturally-grounded survivor support tools.
- Financial disruption: Instead of endless whack-a-mole with individual harassers, movements trace payment flows, identify shared infrastructure, and coordinate deplatforming campaigns to make large-scale tfGBV operations economically unsustainable.
- Policy transformation: Operational intelligence converts to policy frameworks, legal precedents create enforcement pathways, and media partnerships shift cultural norms at regional scale.
The window is closing, but it hasn’t closed yet. AI-enabled harassment is industrializing. Deepfake technology that cost millions two years ago now runs on consumer laptops. But this moment also presents an unprecedented opportunity: the same AI weaponized against women can be reclaimed as feminist defense tools.
We’re ensuring that when the digital future arrives, feminist movements aren’t merely surviving in it—they’re building it.