Feminist Principles of the Internet

The Feminist Principles of the Internet (FPI) is the foundational feminist-tech framework, drafted at a 2014 Association for Progressive Communications-convened global meeting in Malaysia and stewarded by APC's Women's Rights Programme since, that proposes a set of normative statements naming what an internet — and, by extension, the AI and platform systems built on it — would look like if read through a feminist, queer, sex-positive, and Global-South-rooted lens. The framework's version 2.0, published on 19 August 2016 and most recently updated on 21 November 2024, sets out seventeen principles across five clusters — Access, Movements and Public Participation, Economy, Expression, and Embodiment (originally named "Agency" in v2.0) — and the project's living home now also incorporates an Environment principle developed through a hackfeminist process in 2019-2020. In the corpus's terms, the FPI is the principal civil-society-feminist publication-side anchor for the working position that the political question of who the internet — and AI — is being built for, with, and against, is the question that must be answered before technical-fairness or industry-self-governance framings can have any purchase.

Origin and drafting process

The principles were drafted at the Global Meeting on Gender, Sexuality and the Internet, convened by APC's Women's Rights Programme and Communications and Information Policy Programmes at A'Vellion Port Dickson, Malaysia, from 12 to 17 April 2014. The meeting, also circulated publicly under the hashtag #imagineafeministinternet, assembled fifty activists, researchers, and policy experts working across sexual rights, women's rights, violence against women, and internet rights, from twenty-plus jurisdictions including India, Uganda, Canada, China, Pakistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the United States, South Africa, the Dominican Republic, Jordan, Mexico, the Philippines, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malaysia, Brazil, Lebanon, Indonesia, New Zealand, Kenya, and Argentina. The convening was coordinated by Nadine Moawad, the Beirut-based feminist organiser who at that time led APC's global EROTICS (Exploratory Research on Sexuality and the Internet) project. The meeting was run as an adapted open-space process in which topics were identified, prioritised, and discussed collectively, and a self-selected group of participant volunteers drafted version 1.0 of the principles in the course of the week.

The principles were then refined through a second Imagine a Feminist Internet meeting on 22 to 24 July 2015 in Malaysia, where approximately forty-five participants from women's rights, sexual rights, and internet rights organisations reorganised the principles into the five-cluster structure (Agency and autonomy; Digital access; Economy; Expression; Movements and public participation) that anchored version 2.0. Version 2.0 was published online by APC's Women's Rights Programme on 19 August 2016 and opened to public contributions and translations through the project's standalone site. A third convening in the lineage, Making a Feminist Internet: Movement Building in a Digital Age (3 to 6 October 2017, Port Dickson, Malaysia), drew more than eighty mainly-feminist-activist participants and was co-organised by APC with Mama Cash, CREA, FRIDA, Urgent Action Fund, Astraea, and EMPOWER Malaysia; this meeting operationalised the principles against the post-2016 escalation in online gender-based violence, platform-driven censorship, and state surveillance.

The seventeen principles (v2.0)

Version 2.0 organises the principles into five clusters; the cluster originally named "Agency" is now presented on the project site as "Embodiment".

Access (three principles)

1. Access to the internet — universal, affordable, unfettered, unconditional, open, meaningful, and equal access.
2. Access to information — to a diversity of resources, traditional and digital, by, for, and about women in all their diversities, and in our own languages.
3. Usage of technology — the right to participate in technology design, governance, and decision-making, including becoming creators and producers rather than only consumers.

Movements and Public Participation (three principles)

4. Resistance — the internet as a transformative political space for resistance against patriarchy, capitalism, racism, religious fundamentalism, and other oppressions.
5. Movement building — the internet as a powerful tool for feminist movements to advance gender, social, and sexual justice; horizontal feminist organising; cross-movement solidarity.
6. Decision making in internet governance — equal participation of women and queer persons in internet-governance processes from local to global, on substantive terms.

Economy (two principles)

7. Alternative economies — feminist solidarity-economy and commons-based alternatives to the surveillance-and-extraction economic model of the dominant internet.
8. Free and open source — defence of free and open source software, hardware, and licences as enabling autonomy, dissent, and economic and knowledge equality.

Expression (three principles)

9. Amplifying feminist discourse — the internet as a space for feminists and queer persons to speak about their realities, share information, and self-organise.
10. Freedom of expression — opposition to state and non-state censorship and the use of "morality", "obscenity", or "national security" framings to suppress feminist, queer, and sexual-rights speech.
11. Pornography and "harmful content" — a sex-positive approach distinguishing consensual sexual expression and erotic content from non-consensual or violent content; rejection of moralistic regulation that conflates the two.

Embodiment (six principles, presented in v2.0 under the heading "Agency")

12. Consent — meaningful consent in the design and use of internet services and in the collection, processing, and disclosure of personal data.
13. Privacy and data — the right to privacy and full control over personal data and information online at all levels.
14. Memory — the right to determine the disclosure or non-disclosure of personal history on the internet, including the right to erasure.
15. Anonymity — the right to anonymous and pseudonymous expression as essential to women's, sexual-minorities', and dissidents' safety and political voice.
16. Children and youth — children's and young people's rights to access, freedom of expression, privacy, and participation in shaping a feminist internet; opposition to protective framings that justify surveillance.
17. Online violence — recognition of online violence as a continuum with offline gender-based violence, and a politics that addresses it without compromising freedom of expression, privacy, anonymity, or sexual rights.

The environment principle and the post-v2.0 process

The project's living home has, since 2020, also incorporated an Environment principle developed through a hackfeminist gathering convened by the Mexican feminist-tech collective Sursiendo in Chiapas in July 2019 (twenty-six women working across technology, feminism, land defence, and activism), and refined through an October 2020 APC member session titled "I do not want to lay down mountains to be able to use the internet" and a November 2020 Internet Governance Forum Day 0 co-hosted event on "Environmental justice and an anti-extractive internet". The proposed eighteenth principle — that "a feminist internet respects life in all its forms; it does not consume it" — names the material and ecological underside of the data-centre, mining, and energy-extraction footprint on which the internet and the contemporary AI build-out rest, and connects the FPI lineage to the AI-and-environmental-justice agenda that APC carries through its Social and Environmental Justice Programme and the 5 February 2025 joint civil-society statement to the AI Action Summit.

Adoption and circulation

The FPI's principal organisational steward is APC's Women's Rights Programme, which carries the framework into the annual Take Back the Tech! campaign — the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence mobilisation that operationalises the Online violence, Consent, Privacy, and Anonymity principles in particular into a decentralised multi-country campaign cycle — and into APC's submissions to UN human-rights bodies, the Internet Governance Forum, UNESCO, and the multilateral AI-governance processes that have proliferated since 2023. The principles also anchor the methodological substrate of feminist-tech artefacts produced by APC member and partner organisations: the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies — Coding Rights's speculative-design card-deck workshop tool produced in partnership with the Design Justice Network — explicitly cites the FPI as one of three methodological inputs alongside cooptecniques's speculative feminist writing methodology and Coding Rights's IETF Human Rights Considerations work. The principles have circulated through translation into more than a dozen languages, through inclusion in feminist-tech curricula and research syllabi, and through citation in the wider feminist-internet research network that APC has assembled around the framework.

Posture within the corpus

The FPI is the corpus's senior civil-society-feminist framework artefact on the make-AI-good movement's Global-South-rooted feminist wing. It sits structurally beside Oppressive A.I.: Feminist Categories to Understand its Political Effects, the Coding Rights feminist-decolonial seven-category framework for diagnosing AI deployment: where Oppressive A.I. installs a Latin-American case-grounded political-power categorisation for reading specific AI systems, the FPI installs the prior generation's pan-Global-South normative framework for what the internet — and the AI systems layered onto it — should be. The two publications anchor a continuous lineage: the FPI's Consent, Privacy and data, Online violence, and Movement-building principles supply the normative substrate from which the Oppressive A.I. surveillance-of-the-poor, embedded-racism, and patriarchal-by-design categories derive their political-power register. The FPI's distinct contribution within the corpus is its 2014 vintage and its standing as a movement-side-drafted manifesto rather than an analyst-authored framework — fifty activist-researcher-policy-expert participants from twenty-plus jurisdictions, drafting collectively in an open-space process under APC's EROTICS coordination — which gives the framework a movement-built legitimacy that institutionally-produced principles documents in the AI-governance field do not carry.

The FPI is also the institutional anchor of APC's feminist-internet line on the corpus's publications slate. APC's Women's Rights Programme produces several adjacent artefacts named in the APC body — the Gender Evaluation Methodology (GEM) toolkit, the Take Back the Tech! campaign materials, and APC's policy explainers on cybercrime and gender — but the FPI is the framework that the others extend or operationalise. Within the corpus it is the principal civil-society-feminist publication-side companion to APC's organisational entry and to the Take Back the Tech! campaign entry, closing the framework-side gap the synthesizer's coverage scan identified.