Hamara Internet

Hamara Internet ("Our Internet" in Urdu) is the Pakistani working campaign-and-programme register through which the Lahore-headquartered Digital Rights Foundation (DRF) has carried its national feminist-tech response to online violence, technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), and AI-and-gender harms against women, girls, and non-binary people. The framing operates simultaneously as the name of DRF's flagship campaign, as the institutional banner under which the Cyber Harassment Helpline and the organisation's Urdu-language capacity-building work sit, and as the working substantive register for the demand that the internet belongs to Pakistani women rather than being a domain women should be discouraged from inhabiting. Its working seat is DRF; its public-record anchors are the March 2016 launch of the year-long Hamara Internet campaign, the December 2016 launch of the Cyber Harassment Helpline under the same working register, and the framing's continuing operation as DRF's working programme banner into the present period, including the named sub-register Hamara Internet Mahfooz Internet ("Our Internet, Safe Internet") for the school-safety workshops the framing carries into Pakistani public-sector education.

Origin

The framing's working public life begins with the March 2016 launch of the 14-month Hamara Internet campaign by DRF, jointly delivered with Hivos, Ushahidi, and the Institute of Development Studies under the Making All Voices Count fund, with upstream funding from Omidyar Network, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), UK Aid, and US Aid. The launch's substantive working datum, drawn from the Pakistani Federal Investigation Agency cybercrime caseload between August 2014 and 2015, was that 3,027 reported cybercrimes had been registered in that period with 45% of those targeting women on social media — the working evidentiary spine on which the campaign's substantive case for a Pakistani feminist-tech response rested. The campaign's working programme components in the founding period were a self-taught digital-security curriculum, public-facing Urdu-language information on the Pakistani cybercrime-law field, an anonymous online story-sharing platform for survivors of technology-facilitated abuse, and a smartphone application offering legal-remedies information for victims, alongside the workshops, trainings, and research that the campaign delivered nationally across Pakistan.

The framing's working public-facing register sits in DRF's own programme self-description in two compact substantive sentences: that "the Internet is merely a tool – and a powerful tool it is", and that DRF wants Pakistani audiences to "stop treating the Internet as the devil and start treating it more like a tool that you can choose to kill that devil". The framing positions itself deliberately against the working Pakistani social-conservatism register under which women's and girls' internet use is treated as a moral risk, and reframes the question from one of permission ("should women be on the internet?") to one of working enablement ("how can women safely inhabit the internet as a tool for dissent, work, and public life?"). The campaign's working substantive purpose in DRF's own register is "to enable a platform for women to finally voice their dissent online", and the framing's working argument is that Pakistani "women are intellectuals, scientists, business leaders and entrepreneurs too" and that the internet is a working tool through which Pakistani women's full public life — professional, intellectual, political, and social — is conducted.

The Cyber Harassment Helpline and the working capacity-building register

The framing's most consequential working downstream artefact in the founding period is the December 2016 launch of the Cyber Harassment Helpline under the same Hamara Internet banner. The helpline — the first cyber-harassment support hotline in Pakistan, operating as a free, toll-free, gender-sensitive support service — supplies legal counselling, digital-security support, psychological counselling, and a referral system for victims of technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and received 535 calls in its first four months of operation with 62% of callers being women. The helpline operates as the framing's casework register: the working empirical evidence base on which DRF's substantive policy advocacy, AI-and-gender research, and capacity-building lines all rest, and the institutional surface against which the framing's substantive working argument — that Pakistani women face disproportionate technology-facilitated abuse and that the state and the platforms have not built the response infrastructure — is documented.

The framing's named capacity-building register has carried 17 training sessions reaching 1,800 Pakistani women in colleges and universities in the founding 2016 working year alone, and has continued into the present period as DRF's working programme infrastructure across Urdu-language educational materials, the Tech Sahelis peer-to-peer training-network programme, in-person workshops, and the working delivery into Pakistani rural and conservative-area settings (notably Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan) where access to digital-safety knowledge is structurally limited. The 2020 DRF empirical study working datum — that "70% of Pakistani women have experienced some form of online harassment, 60% have experienced cyberstalking, 32% have been threatened with physical violence in online spaces, and 16% have reported that their private images have been published without their consent" — is the framing's clearest single subsequent-evidence working artefact and the working register on which DRF's continuing case for the Hamara Internet response rests.

Travel into the working AI-and-gender register

The framing has carried into DRF's working AI-and-gender programme line as the parent register under which Pakistani feminist civil-society engagement with generative-AI gendered disinformation, AI-synthesised non-consensual intimate imagery, and AI-policy advocacy is conducted. DRF's AI-explicit outputs — including the Feedback to Ministry of IT on Draft National Artificial Intelligence Policy 2023, the EOBI Disinformation on YouTube: The Role of Generative AI in Monetizing Misinformation in Pakistan (2025), and the Disinformation in Warfare in the Age of AI and Synthetic Media (2026) — sit inside the same Hamara Internet working register as DRF's earlier research-portfolio outputs on TFGBV, online harassment, and gendered disinformation, and the framing operates as the substantive bridge through which the campaign's founding 2016 working register on online violence has been carried into the 2023–2026 working register on AI-mediated gendered harms. The substantive working argument inside the framing is that the AI register is not a new working domain for DRF but the continuation of the campaign's founding working argument — that Pakistani women, girls, and non-binary people are the disproportionate targets of technology-mediated harm, and that AI deployment in Pakistani public life intensifies rather than transforms the substantive pattern.

The framing operates as the Pakistani national working register beneath the wider Feminist AI umbrella, alongside the Coding Rights Brazilian-feminist register, the Pollicy Afro-feminist register, and the Derechos Digitales Latin American regional register. Where the Feminist AI umbrella names the cross-regional working civil-society field and the Afro-feminist, Oppressive-AI, and feminist-decolonial registers name the regional analytical grains beneath it, Hamara Internet names the working Pakistani-national capacity-building-and-helpline register through which the umbrella's substantive working argument is carried into Pakistani feminist civil-society organising, the Pakistani Telecommunication Authority's content-moderation field, the Pakistani Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) advocacy field, and the Pakistani public-school digital-literacy field through the Hamara Internet Mahfooz Internet sub-register.

The Hamara Internet Mahfooz Internet public-school register

The framing's most consequential downstream institutional artefact in the 2023 working register is the 28 October 2023 MoU between DRF and the Lahore District Administration under the working sub-register "Hamara Internet Mahfooz Internet" ("Our Internet, Safe Internet"). The MoU, signed with Deputy Commissioner Rafia Haider, carries the framing into Lahore-district public-sector schools with a working workshop series on online safety, the ethics of social-media use, misinformation and disinformation, and support mechanisms for cyberbullying — the framing's clearest single working delivery into Pakistani public-sector education. Deputy Commissioner Haider's working substantive framing of the MoU — that "conversations around online safety and digital literacy are still relatively new and used to happen in private schools mostly" — positions the public-school working register as the framing's substantive equity-axis intervention, deliberately carrying the working knowledge from the private-school and university registers into the public-school working register that serves Pakistan's working-class and lower-middle-class student populations. The Urdu-language adjective extension ("Mahfooz Internet" — "Safe Internet") operates as the working public-school sub-register through which the parent campaign carries the framing's substantive working register into the educational-institution field.

Slogan-and-programme-name working register

Hamara Internet sits inside the corpus's small set of message registers where the hashtag, the campaign name, the working programme banner, and the substantive policy slogan operate as a single working register — alongside #GobiernoEspía on the Mexican Spanish-language commercial-spyware-accountability register, #KeepItOn on the Access-Now-coordinated internet-shutdowns coalition register, and Algorithme de notation de la CAF on the French welfare-algorithm-contestation register. Where #GobiernoEspía anchors on a four-organisation Mexican civil-society coalition, where #KeepItOn anchors on a globally-distributed nearly-70-organisation founding coalition, and where Algorithme de notation de la CAF anchors on a French-and-European fifteen-to-twenty-five-organisation civil-society litigation coalition, Hamara Internet anchors on a single-organisation Pakistani working register carried by DRF — with the campaign's founding implementation partners (Hivos, Ushahidi, the Institute of Development Studies) and capacity-building partners (Tactical Technology, Web We Want) operating as working delivery and infrastructure partners rather than as named co-coordinators of the framing.

The framing's distinctive feature relative to the corpus's existing Anglosphere feminist-tech and capacity-building framings is its operation in Urdu without translation into an Anglosphere coalition register. Where the corpus's adjacent feminist-tech framings — notably the Feminist AI umbrella's Anglosphere-multilateral working register and the Coded gaze framing's Anglosphere-academic working register — carry their substantive working argument in English-language coalition vocabularies, Hamara Internet has carried Pakistani feminist-tech civil-society work into the Pakistani Urdu-language public-discourse register, the Pakistani parliamentary and ministerial-consultation record (PECA, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, the draft national AI policies), and the Pakistani rural and conservative-area working capacity-building record on its own linguistic terms. The framing is the corpus's clearest single working artefact of a Global-South national feminist-tech response delivered in a non-Anglosphere linguistic register without dependence on translation into the international coalition vocabulary.

Why it has carried

Three features have made the framing durable across the decade since its March 2016 launch.

First, the framing names a working programme of construction rather than a single policy demand. Where the corpus's adjacent advocacy framings name a substantive accusation against a state actor or a substantive policy demand on a class of technology, Hamara Internet names a working programme of Pakistani feminist-tech construction — a helpline, a capacity-building register, an empirical-research register, a policy-advocacy register, and an Urdu-language public-discourse register held together by a single working register-banner. The breadth of the working operational footprint is what has converted the framing from a 2016 working launch register into a continuing Pakistani working civil-society field operating across multiple working delivery layers.

Second, the framing operates inside the Pakistani Urdu-language working register rather than as an imported Anglosphere vocabulary. The substantive working compactness of the two-word phrase ("hamara" — our; "internet" — the internet) lets the framing carry into Pakistani Urdu-language press, parliamentary debate, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority correspondence, public-school workshop registers, and rural and conservative-area workshop registers without translation. The working linguistic register is the framing's clearest single durability axis: the substantive Pakistani working insistence that the internet belongs to Pakistani women — hamara — is recognisable to Pakistani audiences in a register that an Anglosphere working translation could not carry.

Third, the framing has built itself a working sustained register across a decade-long working arc that the corpus's adjacent single-moment feminist-tech framings have not. Where the founding-period campaign sat inside the 14-month working window of the Making All Voices Count fund, the framing has carried DRF's wider working programme across the December 2016 helpline launch, the 2017 Measuring Pakistani Women's Experience of Online Violence working empirical artefact, the multi-year annual Cyber Harassment Helpline working report cycle (2019–2024), the 2020 Addressing Online Attacks On Women Journalists In Pakistan report, the 2023 working AI-policy submission on the draft national AI policy, the October 2023 Hamara Internet Mahfooz Internet public-school working sub-register, and the 2024–2026 AI-and-gender working research outputs — each working publication and working programme carrying the same working register-banner forward through the next working operational stage of the campaign. The substantive working durability is what has converted the framing from a March 2016 launch banner into the working Pakistani feminist-tech civil-society register through which the substantive engagement with technology-facilitated gender-based violence, online harassment, and AI-and-gender harms is now conducted — the corpus's first Urdu-language message anchor and its anchor for the South-Asian feminist-tech capacity-building working register that the wider regional feminist civil-society field is built around.