Take Back the Tech! (APC, 2006–ongoing)

In November 2006, Jac sm Kee, the then-Women's Rights Programme Manager at the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), launched the inaugural Take Back the Tech! 16-day campaign with a small group of women organisers in Southeast Asia, anchored on the proposition that the emerging information and communication technologies of the early-2000s — mobile phones, SMS, geolocation, the first wave of social platforms — were already being used to extend the violence women faced in physical spaces into the digital layer, and that the proportionate feminist response was a sustained civil-society campaign that supplied women, girls, and gender-diverse organisers with the language, tools, and infrastructure to name technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) as violence. Twenty years on, Take Back the Tech! is APC's signature flagship campaign — the longest-running and most internationally adopted feminist-tech campaign vehicle in the global digital-rights field — the corpus's principal Global-South-rooted feminist-internet campaign anchor, and the organising frame through which the make-AI-good movement's feminist wing has named and contested technology-facilitated violence across two decades of platform, algorithmic, and AI evolution.

Name disambiguation

A separate but unrelated US campaign of the same name — the MediaJustice and Mijente Take Back Tech convening series (Take Back Tech I San Jose 2019, Take Back Tech II Chicago 2024, Take Back Tech III Atlanta 2026) — operates in the US police-surveillance and immigration-enforcement register. The two campaigns are distinct: APC's Take Back the Tech! is the 2006-launched feminist-internet annual mobilisation against technology-facilitated gender-based violence; MediaJustice's Take Back Tech is the 2019-launched US racial-justice-and-carceral-tech convening series. The corpus carries the latter as a separate Event entry on its 2024 Chicago edition. References to "Take Back the Tech!" or "TBTT" in international, feminist, or Global-South digital-rights contexts are virtually always to APC's campaign; references to "Take Back Tech" in US racial-justice, abolitionist, or carceral-tech contexts are typically to the MediaJustice series.

Origins and the 2005 research base

The campaign's effective origin is the 2005 APC Women's Rights Programme research stream that, in Jac sm Kee's framing, "looked at the connection between ICT and violence against women, an issue that received little attention or discussion at that time." The research papers identified a converging body of evidence that mobile phones, SMS, geolocation software, and emerging social platforms were being used by abusive partners, stalkers, and harassing communities to extend patterns of physical and emotional violence into the digital layer — through SMS harassment, location-tracking, the non-consensual circulation of private images, and the early forms of online harassment of women human-rights defenders, journalists, and feminist organisers. The 2005 research's central observation was that the wider feminist-and-women's-rights field at that point was not engaging with information and communication technologies as either a site of new violence or a site of new feminist agency, and that the field's silence was therefore producing both a substantive harm-naming gap and a strategic missed opportunity.

Take Back the Tech! was conceived as the campaign vehicle through which this gap could be closed. The campaign drew its name and its inspirational lineage from the Take Back the Night movements — the 1970s-and-onward feminist marches reclaiming physical streets and public spaces as safe for women — and reframed the demand at the level of the internet: the campaign's working position is that digital spaces are, like physical streets, public spaces that belong to all people, and that the violence rendering them unsafe for women, girls, and gender-diverse people is a public matter requiring collective civil-society response. The November 2006 inaugural campaign was launched by Jac sm Kee with passionate and like-minded women and co-founded with — among others — Chat Garcia Ramilo, the future APC Executive Director who at that point was managing the APC Women's Rights Programme and whose later biographical record names her as a Take Back the Tech! co-founder. The 16-Days-of-Activism Against Gender-Based Violence window (25 November – 10 December) was selected as the annual peak campaign period, and the campaign has anchored its calendar on this period in every subsequent edition.

Structure: the annual 16-day campaign and the year-round line

Take Back the Tech!'s working structure is a single year-round campaign that peaks in the annual 25 November – 10 December 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence. The structure is deliberately decentralised: APC's Women's Rights Programme provides the campaign's coordination layer, communications infrastructure, central platform at takebackthetech.net, and (where funding allows) sub-granting to local and national partner organisations; the partner organisations adopt the campaign in their own national, sub-national, or community contexts, organising local actions that respond to local priorities — workshops on online safety, media monitoring on rape reporting, solidarity actions on streets and in online spaces, discussions on women's right to privacy, capacity-building on platform-reporting tools, and creative storytelling actions that translate the campaign's substantive framing into local idiom. Smaller campaign editions throughout the year address themes adjacent to the core 16-day mobilisation — state surveillance and women human-rights defenders, the Feminist Principles of the Internet, and the corpus of feminist-tech principles APC has now built over two decades.

The campaign's four named objectives — articulated in both APC's project page and the takebackthetech.net About page — are the establishment of secure digital environments where people can participate freely without harassment, the advancement of women's agency in shaping and using technology, the bridging of communication rights with women's human rights with a focus on technology-facilitated violence, and the acknowledgement of women's historical contributions to ICT development. These have been carried consistently across two decades of campaign editions, with the substantive content of each year's edition reflecting the evolution of the surrounding technological and political landscape.

The MDG3 phase: scaling to twelve countries through sub-granting (2009-2012)

The campaign's first major scaling phase was the MDG3: Take Back the Tech! project, launched in January 2009 with Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (DGIS) funding under the UN Millennium Development Goal 3 line on gender equality and women's empowerment. The MDG3 phase ran the campaign as a coordinated multi-country mobilisation across twelve countries on three continents — South Africa, Uganda, Republic of Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa; Pakistan, Cambodia, Malaysia, and the Philippines in Asia; and Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil in Latin America — with sub-grants of up to USD 5,000 disbursed to over sixty local, primarily community-based organisations to implement projects using technology to combat violence against women in their own jurisdictions. The MDG3 phase's primary beneficiary categories were survivors of domestic and sexual violence; marginalised women including poor, rural, and migrant populations; adolescent girls and girls' networks; and women's organisations operating in armed-conflict zones — a target population mapping that shaped the campaign's substantive priorities for the following decade and the campaign's enduring orientation toward partners working at the most-vulnerable end of the violence-against-women field.

The MDG3 phase established the working architecture that the campaign has carried since: APC supplies the coordination layer, the central campaign identity, the international policy-advocacy track, and the sub-granting and capacity-building functions; partner organisations operate the campaign's day-to-day local work, supply the on-the-ground feedback loop on the campaign's framing, and route the campaign's substantive position into national policy-advocacy work in their own contexts. The Dutch-government grant cycle was succeeded by further Dutch-government grant rounds in 2012-2015, with continued multi-country campaign support. Through the wider trajectory APC has maintained Take Back the Tech! as a core line in the Women's Rights Programme, with the campaign now run as one of the principal Women's Rights Programme instruments alongside the Feminist Internet Research Network and the APC-wide feminist-internet theme.

The 2011 "Map it. End it." mapping infrastructure

In 2011 Take Back the Tech! ran its Map it. End it. edition (25 November – 10 December), centred on the takebackthetech.net mapping platform under the framing "collectively gather evidence for transformation" and the slogan "make the invisible visible". The 2011 edition framed the campaign's substantive case at the level of evidence: that TFGBV had been systematically under-counted because the data infrastructure to surface and aggregate cases had not existed; that the campaign would build that infrastructure as a global civil-society mapping platform on which individual women, organisers, and partner organisations could document cases; and that the resulting evidence base would be the campaign's strongest civil-society argument for the recognition of TFGBV in policy and legal frameworks. The 2011 mapping organised TFGBV into five categories: culturally-justified violence (including sexist content); online harassment and cyberstalking via mobile phones and social networks; intimate-partner violence enabled through private-image threats; sexual-assault cases involving the recording and distribution of technology-mediated material; and violence targeting communities based on gender identity, sexual orientation, or political beliefs. The five-category framing is the corpus's earliest civil-society articulation of what would later become the field's TFGBV taxonomy, and the platform itself anchored the campaign's case-by-case evidence base through the 2010s.

Recognition: GEM-TECH 2014 and Prix Ars Electronica 2008 / 2014

In 2014 Take Back the Tech! was awarded the inaugural GEM-TECH award from UN Women and the International Telecommunication Union, in the category "Efforts to Reduce Threats Online and Building Women's Confidence and Security in the Use of ICTs". The award marked the campaign's recognition by the UN system as the principal civil-society instrument in the field, and supplied the campaign with a multilateral-system endorsement that anchored APC's subsequent engagement on TFGBV in the UN Human Rights Council, in CEDAW jurisprudence, and in the UN Special Rapporteur lines on violence against women and on freedom of expression. Take Back the Tech! also received Prix Ars Electronica honorary mentions in both 2008 and 2014 — the Linz-based digital-arts prize's recognition of the campaign's creative-storytelling and activist-aesthetics dimensions, both running alongside the substantive policy-advocacy track. These recognitions sit alongside what the campaign's organisers themselves have described as a 2015 milestone of a different kind: a documented coordinated online attack on the #TakeBackTheTech hashtag involving over 20,000 anti-feminist and abusive tweets — itself the kind of platform-mediated retaliatory violence the campaign was built to surface and counter, and a marker of how directly the campaign had begun to threaten the platform-mediated abuse architectures it was contesting.

The algorithmic and AI turn (2019-2026)

Through the second half of the 2010s Take Back the Tech! began to extend its substantive frame from interpersonal and platform-mediated violence into the layer of algorithmic content moderation and, in the 2020s, into the territory of AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery, deepfakes, and the automated decision-systems that the wider corpus tracks. The 2019 edition was the first to explicitly name automated content moderation and algorithmic suppression of women's organising as a TFGBV vector, organised around the three themes Witness Silencing (account closures, content takedowns, algorithmic suppression of feminist content and counter-speech), Occupy (reclaiming digital space through solidarity action), and Create (production of feminist content through collaborative workshops and training). APC's own substantive position, articulated in the press piece "Algorithms set back the struggle for gender equality", is that "machines don't erase biases and inequalities, including gendered ones" — that algorithmic content moderation systems, AI deployments in healthcare, employment, and public-service contexts, and the broader infrastructure of AI-driven platform governance routinely produce gendered harms in the form of erasure of LGBTIQ+ identities through content-moderation rules, discrimination in employment-filtering and healthcare algorithms, and the intersectional disadvantage of women in poverty being routed to algorithmic decision-points while wealthier individuals receive human interaction.

The campaign's 2024 edition anchored on the #NoTechForWar framing, naming "tech fascism and AI geopolitics" as critical issues and the surveillance of women human-rights defenders in conflict zones from Sudan to Kashmir as a contemporary TFGBV register, and treating the deployment of AI-mediated surveillance and content-moderation infrastructures against women defenders as a continuation of the campaign's core question. The post-2022 emergence of AI-generated deepfake non-consensual intimate imagery as a major TFGBV vector — image-based sexual abuse produced by generative-AI systems trained on non-consenting bodies, distributed at platform scale, and disproportionately targeting women in public life, women organisers, and adolescent girls — has been folded into the campaign's substantive frame as the latest in the line of technology-extended-violence vectors the campaign was built to name. In 2026 APC convened a twenty-year retrospective webinar on the campaign, reflecting on the trajectory, the current state of TFGBV in the AI era, and the campaign's framing of alternatives to disrupt the digital platforms whose business models the campaign has now spent two decades arguing reproduce gendered violence.

Coalition and partner shape

Take Back the Tech! has run, since its 2006 launch, as a coordinated decentralised campaign operating through APC's 73-member network and through national and community partner organisations sub-granted into the campaign or self-organising under its banner. Within the corpus, two partner organisations carry substantive Take Back the Tech! lineages worth naming. Coding Rights — the Brazilian feminist-tech / transfeminist organisation founded by Joana Varon — sits inside the campaign's Brazilian and wider Latin American adoption lineage, and Coding Rights's own Brazilian #SaiDaMinhaCara campaign vehicle on facial recognition is built on the feminist-internet methodological frame that Take Back the Tech! has anchored across the region for two decades. The Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA) in the Philippines is one of the campaign's longest-running country-level partner organisations, and the Philippines was among the original MDG3 phase country roster.

Beyond the corpus, the campaign's country-adoption roster as of the 2024 record names over twenty countries — Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Germany, India, Kenya, Macedonia, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Uruguay — with the geographic weighting deliberately tilted toward the Global South in line with APC's Asia-Africa-Latin-America-anchored network shape. The current campaign lead is Mexico-based Erika Smith operating under Chat Garcia Ramilo's executive directorship and the wider APC Women's Rights Programme.

Place in the make-AI-good movement

Take Back the Tech! matters to the wider make-AI-good corpus on four connected counts. First, it is the corpus's principal Global-South-rooted, feminist-internet-anchored, multi-country annual campaign vehicle on technology-facilitated violence — structurally distinct from the corpus's other anti-platform-harm and anti-algorithmic-discrimination campaign vehicles (the EDRi-coordinated Reclaim Your Face EU Citizens' Initiative on biometric surveillance, the Coding Rights #SaiDaMinhaCara Brazilian anti-facial-recognition vehicle, the Algorithm Watch OpenSCHUFA credit-scoring transparency campaign), and the only feminist-internet-anchored campaign in the corpus that has carried an annual mobilisation calendar across two decades. Second, it is the campaign-entity anchor for the Association for Progressive Communications — APC's signature flagship campaign and the principal organising frame through which APC's Global-South-network model and feminist-internet line have been carried into the wider digital-rights and AI-governance field. Third, the campaign closes the corpus's principal coverage gap on the gender-and-technology-violence movement area, supplying the corpus with its first feminist-internet annual-campaign vehicle and complementing the existing register on feminist-tech (Coding Rights, Digital Rights Foundation), feminist research (the Feminist Internet Research Network), and feminist organisational anchoring (APC's Women's Rights Programme). Fourth, the campaign's substantive framing — that information and communication technologies and AI are not gender-neutral; that the violence they extend falls disproportionately on women, girls, gender-diverse people, and queer organisers; that algorithmic content moderation, AI-generated deepfake non-consensual intimate imagery, and AI-driven surveillance of women human-rights defenders are continuations of the same TFGBV question; and that the proportionate civil-society response is a feminist reshaping of platform and AI infrastructures — is the Global-South feminist anchor of the wider make-AI-good movement's substantive position on AI, gender, and technology-facilitated violence, and is now the field's longest-running, most internationally adopted civil-society organising frame on that position.