Feminist Principles of the Internet — Version 2.0

Version 2.0 of the Feminist Principles of the Internet is not a neutral operating manual for being online. It is a political statement developed through collective feminist work. The document treats the internet as a field where rights, relationships and resources are distributed: who can connect, speak and shape governance, and whose bodies and data become objects of surveillance or profit. Published by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) in 2016, its seventeen principles are grouped around access; movements and public participation; economy; expression; and agency. Its value lies less in offering one answer for every context than in requiring designers and policymakers to ask whom a technology serves.

Access means more than whether a connection exists. The principles also call for information relevant to women and queer communities—including sexual and reproductive health, justice, and LGBTQI issues—and ask that language, ability and lived circumstances matter. This makes the digital divide more than a count of devices. A person may be online yet unable to participate meaningfully if essential information is inaccessible, a platform is unsafe, or speaking invites punishment. The economic principles extend the question to privatization and corporate control, while naming commons, open tools and cooperation as political alternatives.

The sections on expression and agency show how platform rules also govern bodies. Consent, personal-data control, memory, anonymity, young people’s safety and online violence appear together. People should be able to decide what they share, know who holds their information, and retain ways to control or delete it; anonymity can make expression and identity exploration safer. These are not unrelated product features. They ask how platforms, states and other users affect who can remain, speak and be remembered.

The document’s tensions should stay visible. Open expression, privacy, accountability and safety can conflict in a particular situation, and the principles do not supply a universal ranking for every community. Nor are they an empirical audit of every contemporary platform. Version 2.0 dates from 2016, so it is best read as a historically situated advocacy text. APC’s current website continues to organize related principles; that living page should not be mistaken for a verbatim reissue of the 2016 document. The text is most useful when turned into practical questions: Can consent be withdrawn? Is non-participation a real option? Who can demand an explanation, correction or deletion after data is collected?

Read it beside Feminist Data Manifest-No: the principles describe rights and relationships a feminist internet should protect, while the Manifest-No asks more directly when harmful data regimes should be refused. APC provides the Version 2.0 text and its publication page. For later developments, consult the separate current Feminist Principles of the Internet site.