Happy April Fools! A feminist internet would explode after only 28 days.

It's the first of April, the day where fake news is even more fake than usual, and everybody wants to get in on the joke, from corporations like Starbucks and WestJet, to academic journals like this hilarious scribe from a couple years ago in the M.I.T. Technology Review:

A feminist internet would be better for everyone

It’s April 13, 2025. Like most 17-year-olds, Maisie grabs her phone as soon as she wakes up. She checks her apps in the same order every morning: Herd, Signal, TikTok.

Herd started out as a niche social network aimed at girls, but everyone’s on it these days, even the boys. Maisie goes to her personal page and looks at what she’s pinned there: photos of her dog, her family, her school science project. It’s like a digital scrapbook of all the things she loves, all in one place. She reads comments from her friends and looks at what they’ve added to their own pages. She doesn’t really go on Facebook—only grandparents are still using that—or Twitter. Herd is just … nicer. No like counts. No follower metrics. No shouty strangers.

She checks Signal. Signal’s been popular since the Great WhatsApp Exodus of 2023, when WhatsApp announced it would share yet more data with Facebook, and users fled to more secure, encrypted alternatives.

Next, TikTok. She watches a video of some girls dancing, swipes up, sees a cat jumping through a hoop, swipes up, reads an explainer on volcanoes. TikTok doesn’t collect so much data these days—nothing on her location or her keystrokes. Much of that sort of data collection is illegal now, thanks to the Data Protection Act pushed through by lawmakers in the US three years ago over Big Tech’s lobbying.

It's not really "ha ha" funny so much as it's kind of cute. TikTok not collecting userdata after it follows the marching orders of a government? Ha!

Death threats and online abuse aren’t the only online issues that disproportionately affect women, though. There are also less tangible harms, like algorithmic discrimination. For example, try Googling the terms “school boy” and “school girl.” The image results for boys are mostly innocuous, whereas the results for girls are dominated by sexualized imagery. Google ranks these results on the basis of factors such as what web page an image appears on, its alt text or caption, and what it contains, according to image recognition algorithms. Bias creeps in via two routes: the image recognition algorithms themselves are trained on sexist images and captions from the internet, and web pages and captions talking about women are skewed by the pervasive sexism that’s built up over decades online.

That falls more into "hilariously clueless" than anything. The reason "school boy" gives different results than "school girl" is that other than George Takei and Randy Boissonnault nobody wants to have sex with anybody who resembles a schoolboy. The idea that this is somehow merely how "the internet" works is laughable. It's not rip roaring funny like that April Fools gag where the girl sent vag-pics on dating sites, but it's pretty good (and unlike that other one that got caught up in the draft status that occasionally plagues this blog, this one at least was posted on April 1st.

So what would a “feminist internet” look like?

There’s no single vision or approved definition. The closest thing the movement has to a set of commandments are 17 principles published in 2016 by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), a sort of United Nations for online activist groups.

The "17 principles" are themselves pretty hilarious, with such notions as "interrogating the capitalist logic that drives technology" (I sure hope you didn't want your computer to get better over time). It's also, as everything with women should properly be if you're crafting your joke correctly, be completely scatterbrained without any logic or internal consistency. That's how the principles can both say how they "defend the right to sexual expression as a freedom of expression issue of no less importance than political or religious expression" and then immediately attack political or religious expression that goes against them by also saying how they "call on all internet stakeholders, including internet users, policy makers and the private sector, to address the issue of online harassment" which of course explicitly includes things like "misogynist speech" which we know women will never define improperly because again chicks never ever do that.

To live up to these principles, companies would have to give more control and decision-making power to users. This would mean not only that individuals would be able to adjust things like our security and privacy settings (with the strongest privacy as the default), but that we could act collectively—by proposing and voting on new features, for example.

Haha, could you imagine this? People (rightly) criticize Elon Musk for his "4 hour online poll" method of corporate governance, but imagine if you created a killer feature that at the push of a button would let you do something awesome with your internet connection like order a pizza or arrange to have a flood destroy Ellen Degeneres' house, but then it couldn't ever be implemented...ever...because some busybody voted against it?

Take Tracy Chou.

Take my Tracy Chou. Please! (sometimes you just can't mess with the classics)

But Chou isn’t most people. She used her engineering skills to build a tool called Block Party, which aims to make Twitter more bearable by helping people filter out abuse. All the replies and mentions you don’t want to see are put in a “lockout folder” you or an appointed friend can check at a time of your own choosing (or not at all). Its early users have predominantly been women who face rampant online abuse, Chou says: reporters, activists, and scientists working on covid-19. But mostly, she made it for herself: “I’m doing this because I have to deal with online harassment and I don’t like it. It’s solving my own problem.” Since Chou started building Block Party, at the end of 2018, Twitter has adopted one or two of its features. For example, it now lets people limit who can reply to their tweets.

Now that is funny: a person actually wants to take credit for the increasing need to insulurly project bad (leftist) social media takes from honest criticism by superior people who call it out. Hey you know that thing where as soon as too many comments on a news article point out that the entire article is bullshit they instantly lock it down? I really want to write a wonderful account about the useless tit who came up with it!

They aren't done with the hilarious bullshit, of course.

A 2019 United Nations report concluded that smart speakers reinforce harmful gender stereotypes. It called for companies to stop making digital assistants female by default and explore ways to make them sound “genderless.”

There are only two sexes, so the voice is going to sound either male or female. "Genderless" voices is just a fancy term for "faggy". Also, what's harmful about the idea that both men and women are more comfortable interacting with a female computer voice? Majel Barret got paycheques for that over four different decades!

Ultimately, women have the right to be online without fear of harassment. Think of all the women who have not set up online retailers, or started blogging, or run for office, or created a YouTube channel, because they worry they will be harassed or even physically harmed. When women are chased off platforms, it becomes a civil rights issue.

One is both reminded of Kate McMillan's reminder that every single person "harassed online" consented, and the question to wonder what to make of social conservatives like yours truely being "chased off platforms" and whether that is also a civil rights issue.

Anyways we're getting way into the weeds with this. We would like to thank author Charlotte Jee for...oh wow, the dude who wrote this really went whole hog in this April Fools skit by even coming up with a chick's name for the byline.

Oh hey look at that, he really committed to this, like that time that RedLetterMedia actually created a chicken restaurant webpage: he actually created a social media presence for "Charlotte Jee" and is still populating it and everything and...

...and...

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...and...

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...oh my Lord it's real.

I'm so terribly sorry.

This is already the worst April ever. Here, let me make it up to you by showing you that her (female) coworker is kinda hot.