{"id":306532,"date":"2025-12-09T07:40:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T07:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/306532\/"},"modified":"2025-12-09T07:40:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T07:40:08","slug":"dont-pander-to-the-tech-giants-how-a-youth-movement-for-digital-justice-is-spreading-across-europe-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/306532\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Don\u2019t pander to the tech giants!\u2019 How a youth movement for digital justice is spreading across Europe | Social media"},"content":{"rendered":"

Late one night in April 2020, towards the start of the Covid lockdowns, Shanley Cl\u00e9mot McLaren was scrolling on her phone when she noticed a Snapchat<\/a> post by her 16-year-old sister. \u201cShe\u2019s basically filming herself from her bed, and she\u2019s like: \u2018Guys you shouldn\u2019t be doing this. These fisha accounts are really not OK. Girls, please protect yourselves.\u2019 And I\u2019m like: \u2018What is fisha?\u2019 I was 21, but I felt old,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

She went into her sister\u2019s bedroom, where her sibling showed her a Snapchat account named \u201cfisha\u201d plus the code of their Paris suburb. Fisha is French slang for publicly shaming someone \u2013 from the verb \u201cafficher\u201d, meaning to display or make public. The account contained intimate images of girls from her sister\u2019s school and dozens of others, \u201calong with the personal data of the victims \u2013 their names, phone numbers, addresses, everything to find them, everything to put them in danger\u201d.<\/p>\n

McLaren, her sister and their friends reported the account to Snapchat dozens of times, but received no response. Then they discovered there were fisha accounts for different suburbs, towns and cities across France and beyond. Faced with the impunity of the social media platforms, and their lack of moderation, they launched the hashtag #StopFisha.<\/p>\n

It went viral, online and in the media. #StopFisha<\/a> became a rallying cry, a safe space to share information and advice, a protest movement. Now it was the social media companies being shamed. \u201cThe wave became a counter-wave,\u201d says McLaren, who is now 26. The French government got involved, and launched an online campaign on the dangers and legal consequences of fisha accounts. The social media companies began to moderate at last, and #StopFisha is now a \u201ctrusted flagger\u201d with Snapchat and TikTok, so when they report fisha content, it is taken down within hours. \u201cI realised that if you want change in your societies, if you come with your idea alone, it won\u2019t work. You need support behind you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shanley Cl\u00e9mot McLaren at the UN. Photograph: Baz Ratner<\/p>\n

Four years later, this strategy is playing out on an even larger scale. McLaren and other young activists across Europe are banding together against social media and its ruinous effects on their generation. Individually, young people are powerless to sway big tech, but they are also a substantial part of its business model \u2013 so, collectively, they are powerful.<\/p>\n

This is the first generation to have grown up with social media: they were the earliest adopters of it, and therefore the first to suffer its harms. The array of problems is ever-expanding: misogynistic, hateful and disturbing content; addictive and skewed algorithms; invasion of privacy; online forums encouraging harmful behaviours; sextortion; screen addiction; deepfake pornography; misinformation and disinformation; radicalisation; surveillance; biased AI \u2013 the list goes on. As the use of social media has risen, there has been a corresponding increase in youth mental health problems, anxiety, depression, self-harm and even suicide.<\/p>\n

\u201cAcross Europe, a generation is suffering through a silent crisis,\u201d says a new report<\/a> from People vs Big Tech<\/a> \u2013 a coalition of more than 140 digital rights NGOs from around Europe \u2013 and Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim<\/a>, their youth-led spin-off. A big factor is \u201cthe design and dominance of social media platforms\u201d.<\/p>\n

Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim, for people aged 15 to 29, came about in September last year when People vs Big Tech put out a call \u2013 on social media, paradoxically. About 20 young people who were already active on these issues came together at a \u201cboot camp\u201d in London. \u201cWe were really given the tools to create the movement that we wanted to build,\u201d says McLaren, who attended with her partner. \u201cThey booked a big room, they brought the food, pencils, paper, everything we needed. And they were like: \u2018This is your space, and we\u2019re here to help.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The group is Europe\u2019s first digital justice movement by and for young people. Their demands are very simple, or at least they ought to be: inclusion of young people in decision-making; a safer, healthier, more equitable social media environment; control and transparency over personal data and how it is used; and an end to the stranglehold a handful of US-based corporations have over social media and online spaces. The overarching principle is: \u201cNothing for us, without us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not just us being angry; it\u2019s us having the right to speak,\u201d says McLaren, who is now a youth mobilisation lead for Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim. Debates over digital rights are already going on, of course, but, she says: \u201cWe find it really unfair that we\u2019re not at the table. Young people<\/a> have so much to say, and they\u2019re real experts, because they have lived experience \u2026 So why aren\u2019t they given the proper space?\u201d<\/p>\n

McLaren\u2019s work with #StopFisha took her on a journey into a wider, murkier world of gender-based digital rights: misogynist trolling and sexism, cyberstalking, deepfake pornography \u2013 but she realised this was just one facet of the problem. What women were experiencing online, other groups were experiencing in their own ways.<\/p>\n

A fellow activist, Yassine, 23, is well aware of this. Originally from north Africa and now living in Germany, Yassine identifies as non-binary. They fled to Europe to escape intolerance in their own country, but the reality of life, even in a supposedly liberal country such as Germany, hit them like a \u201cslap\u201d, they say. \u201cYou\u2019re here for your safety, but then you\u2019re trying to fight not only the system that is punishing the queerness of you, but you also have another layer of being a migrant. So you have two battles instead of one.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018The systems are patriarchal and racist by design\u2019 \u2026 Yassine, who leads on digital rights at LGBTQ+ youth rights organisation IGLYO. Photograph: IGLYO<\/p>\n

As a migrant they are seen as a threat, Yassine says. \u201cOur bodies and movements must be tracked, fingerprinted and surveilled through intrusive digital systems designed to protect the EU.\u201d For queer people, there are similar challenges. These include \u201cshadow-banning\u201d, for example, by which tech platforms \u201csilence conversations about queer rights, racism or anything that is challenging the dominant system\u201d, either wilfully or algorithmically, through built-in biases.<\/p>\n

Measures such as identity verification \u201care also putting a lot of people at risk of being erased from these spaces\u201d, says Yassine. There can be good reasons for them, but they can also end up discriminating against non-binary or transgender people \u2013 who are often presented with binary gender options; male or female \u2013 as well as against refugees and undocumented people, who may be afraid or unable to submit their details online. Given their often tenuous residency status, and sometimes limited digital literacy and access, migrants tend not to speak out, Yassine says. \u201cIt definitely feels like you are in a position of: \u2018You need to be grateful that you are here, and you should not question the laws.\u2019 But the laws are harming my data.\u201d<\/p>\n

On a more day-to-day level, Yassine says, they must \u201cwalk through online spaces knowing they could do harm to me\u201d. If they click on the comments under a social media post, for example, they know they are likely to find racist, homophobic or hateful attacks. Like McLaren, Yassine says that complaining is futile. \u201cI know that they will come back with, \u2018This is not a community guidelines breach\u2019, and all of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

These are not mere glitches in the system, says Yassine, who now leads on digital rights at IGLYO<\/a>, a long-running LGBTQ+ youth rights organisation, founded in Brussels, with a network of groups across Europe. \u201cThe systems we design inherit the very structures they arise from, so they inevitably become systems that are patriarchal and racist by design.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adele Zeynep Walton\u2019s participation in Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim came through personal experience of online harm. In 2022, Walton\u2019s 21-year-old sister, Aimee, took her own life. She had been struggling with her mental health, but had also been spending time on online suicide and self-harm forums, which Walton believes contributed to her death. After that, Walton began to question the digital realm she had grown up in, and her own screen addiction.<\/p>\n

Walton\u2019s parents made her first Facebook account when she was 10, she says. She has been on Instagram<\/a> since she was 12. Her own feelings of body dysmorphia began when she was 13, sparked by pro-anorexia content her friends were sharing. \u201cI became a consumer of that, then I got immersed in this world,\u201d she says. \u201cGenerations like mine thought it was totally normal, having this everyday battle with this addictive thing, having this constant need for external validation. I thought those were things that were just wrong with me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adele Zeynep Walton, who became a campaigner after the death of her sister, in the garden of her family home in Southampton. Photograph: Peter Flude\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

In researching her book Logging Off: The Human Cost of our Digital World<\/a>, Walton, 26, also became aware of how little control young people have over the content that is algorithmically served up to them. \u201cWe don\u2019t really have any choice over what our feeds look like. Despite the fact there are things where you can say, \u2018I don\u2019t want to see this type of content\u2019, within a week, you\u2019re still seeing it again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alycia Colijn, 29, another member of Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim, knows something about this. She studied data science and marketing analytics at university in Rotterdam, researching AI-driven algorithms \u2013 how they can be used to manipulate behaviour, and in whose interests. During her studies she began to think: \u201cIt\u2019s weird that I\u2019m trained to gather as much data as I can, and to build a model that can respond to or predict what people want to buy, but I\u2019ve never had a conversation around ethics.\u201d Now she is researching these issues as co-founder of Encode Europe<\/a>, which advocates for human-centric AI. \u201cI realised how much power these algorithms have over us; over our society, but also over our democracies,\u201d she says. \u201cCan we still speak of free will if the best psychologists in the world are building algorithms that make us addicted?\u201d<\/p>\n

The more she learned, the more concerned Colijn became. \u201cWe made social media into a social experiment,\u201d she says. \u201cIt turned out to be the place where you could best gather personal data from individuals. Data turned into the new gold, and then tech bros became some of the most powerful people in the world, even though they aren\u2019t necessarily known for caring about society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Social media companies have had ample opportunities to respond to these myriad harms, but invariably they have chosen not to. Just as McLaren found with Snapchat and the fisha accounts, hateful and racist content is still minimally moderated on platforms such as X, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube. After Donald Trump\u2019s re-election, Mark Zuckerberg stated at the start of this year that Meta would be reducing factcheckers<\/a> across Facebook and Instagram, just as X has under Elon Musk. This has facilitated the free flow of misinformation. Meta<\/a>, Amazon<\/a> and Google<\/a> were also among the companies announcing they were rolling back their diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, post-Trump\u2019s election. The shift towards the right politically, in the US and Europe, has inevitably affected these platforms\u2019 tolerance of hateful and racist content, says Yassine. \u201cPeople feel like now they have more rights to be harmful than rights to be protected.\u201d<\/p>\n

All the while, the tech CEOs have become more powerful, economically, politically and in terms of information control. \u201cWe don\u2019t believe that power should be in those hands,\u201d says Colijn. \u201cThat\u2019s not a true democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Europe\u2019s politicians aren\u2019t doing much better. Having drafted the Digital Services Act<\/a> in 2023, which threatened social media companies with fines or bans if they failed to regulate harmful content, the European Commission announced last month it would be rolling back<\/a> some of its data privacy laws, to allow big tech companies to use people\u2019s personal data for training AI systems.<\/p>\n

\u201cBig tech, combined with the AI innovators, say they are the growth of tomorrow\u2019s economy, and that we have to trust them. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s true,\u201d says Colijn. She also disagrees with their argument that regulation harms innovation. \u201cThe only thing deregulation fosters is harmful innovation. If we want responsible innovation, we need regulation in place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walton agrees. \u201cGovernments and MPs are shooting themselves in the foot by pandering to tech giants, because that just tells young people that they don\u2019t care about our future,\u201d she says. \u201cThere\u2019s this massive knowledge gap between the people who are making the decisions, and the tech justice movement and everyday people who are experiencing the harms.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim is not calling for the wholesale destruction of social media. All these activists say they have found community, solidarity and joy in online spaces: \u201cWe\u2019re fighting for these spaces to accommodate us,\u201d says Yassine. \u201cWe\u2019re not protesting to cancel them. We know how harmful they are, but they are still spaces where we have hope.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018The only thing deregulation fosters is harmful innovation\u2019 \u2026 Alycia Colijn, co-founder of Encode. Photograph: Henry Maathuis<\/p>\n

Colijn echoes this. \u201cSocial media used to be a fun place with the promise of connecting the world,\u201d she says. \u201cThat\u2019s where we started.\u201d And that\u2019s what they want it to be again.<\/p>\n

Will big tech pay attention? They might not have a choice, as countries and legislators begin to take action. This week Australia will become the first country to ban social media accounts<\/a> for under-16s on major platforms including Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok and X. Last week, after a two-year deliberation, X was fined \u20ac120m<\/a> (\u00a3105m) by the EU for breaching data laws. But these companies continue to platform content that is hateful, racist, harmful, misleading or inflammatory, with impunity.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim is just getting started. Other discussions on the table include campaigning for an EU-funded social media platform, an alternative to the big tech oligopoly, created by and for the public. Another alternative is direct action, either protest or consumer activism such as coordinated boycotts. \u201cI think it\u2019s lazy for us to be like: we don\u2019t have any power,\u201d says Walton. \u201cBecause we could literally say that about anything: fast fashion, fossil fuels \u2026 OK, but how do we change things?\u201d<\/p>\n

The other alternative is simply to log off. \u201cThe other side of the coin to this movement of tech justice, and a sort of liberation from the harms that we\u2019ve experienced over the past 20 years, is reducing our screen time,\u201d says Walton. \u201cIt is spending more time in community. It is connecting with people who maybe you would have never spoken to on social media, because you\u2019d be in different echo chambers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Almost all the activists in Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim attest to having had some form of screen addiction. As much as social media has brought them together, it has also led to much less face-to-face socialising. \u201cI\u2019ve had to sort of rewire my brain to get used to the awkwardness and get comfortable with being in a social setting and not knowing anyone,\u201d says Walton. \u201cActually, it would be really nice to return to proper connection.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans<\/a> can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org<\/a> or jo@samaritans.ie<\/a>. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline<\/a> at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org<\/a>. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline<\/a> is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org<\/a><\/p>\n

In the UK, the charity Mind<\/a> is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline<\/a> on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America<\/a> at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org. In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue<\/a> on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline<\/a> on 13 11 14, and at MensLine<\/a> on 1300 789 978<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Late one night in April 2020, towards the start of the Covid lockdowns, Shanley Cl\u00e9mot McLaren was scrolling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":306533,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-306532","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306532\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/306533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}