At MozFest and beyond, defending the internet from “Machitrolls”
Magical witches gathering in bands or “covens” to battle leering trolls might bring to mind sword-and-sorcery epics, but Amalia Toledo of the Colombian-based Fundación Karisma borrows this metaphor to counter sexism by online users she calls “machitrolls.” (Machitroll is a combination of the words “troll” and “machismo” or “macho”). Toledo brought her session “A Coven to Fight Machitrolls” to London for MozFest 2018, representing the Alerta Machitroll project.
Toledo, a historian and human rights lawyer from Puerto Rico, explains that “machitrolls” are internet users that search the web to target female or feminist content with comments, posts, tweets that promote hatred and violence against women. The term, which originated with the project in 2015, is now used throughout Latin America. “Covens” are gatherings of people who organize against machitrolls, using one of the internet’s most powerful tools: memes.
Toledo is a project coordinator at Fundación Karisma, an organization that works to defend human rights online. The Alerta Machitrolls project is at the intersection of the Fundación’s key issues: freedom of expression, access to knowledge, privacy, digital security and gender.
“The workshops are a unique opportunity to sit down and do a kind of profiling of the macho violence, but also to subtract power from it through the use of humor, from something as typical of pop culture as a meme.” says Toledo.
Alerta Machitrolls was inspired by another online intervention against sexism — a campaign using a meme of David Hasslehof to critique the all-too prevalent phenomenon of all-male panels at conferences. Toledo and Fundación Karisma saw a version of that same sexist exclusion and hostility against women playing out on the internet: across social media, on content-sharing platforms, and in other online spaces.
The project started with workshops or “covens” in Colombia to identify and tag sexist speech online. Participants added the Machitroll badges to posts on social media to call out troll behavior.
In 2018 Karisma replicated the model in mini-workshops in Bolivia, taking into account local culture and concerns. “We sought to characterize the chauvinist, misogynist and sexist speeches that we women receive and then create responses that seek to disarm the power of those speeches.” says Toledo. “With the localization… we hope that the campaign, which has succeeded in naming the phenomenon of male violence, will be better received in other countries in the region.”
In her MozFest session, Toledo planned to collaborate with participants to create humorous graphics in response to each kind of machitroll. The Machitroll typology generated in the Colombian and Bolivian versions of the workshop included: Incurable Machitroll (Machitroll Incurable), Recoverable Machitroll (Machitroll Rescatable) or Machitroll Alert (Alerta Machitroll).
At MozFest, on the morning her workshop was scheduled, a huge delay on the London transit system kept participants away. Though this was disappointing, Toledo got a chance to present her work later that day. “The surprising thing is that a friend who had a menstruation app session invited me to join her, so in the end I got a space to at least show the campaign,” says Toledo. “The session on the menstrual app was entirely decorated with all the material from the Machitroll Alert campaign, which felt great.” During the session the project generated good discussion, including an incident of “mansplaining” that Toledo says reminded her that this work is needed, in all kinds of spaces.
Since MozFest, Toledo and Fundación Karisma have been busy. The organization won the Digital Activism Award from the Index on Censorship for this campaign, among other initiatives. And Toledo has been collaborating with sister organizations to hold covens throughout Latin America. These workshops introduce the campaign, develop the typology of machitrolls according to local contexts, and design comic responses to those machitrolls. Successful workshops have already been organized in Chile and Mexico.
In each new workshop, Toledo is fine-tuning the approach. One criticism the campaign has heard is that highlighting the machitrolls’ speech is not enough — there’s a need for training participants on how to respond. And the project has produced an illustrated guide with 10 strategies for machitrolls seeking to change their behavior.
“The campaign does not want to create a snowball of violence,” says Toledo, “we do see that humor is a good way to re-signify violence. That is why we are now betting on this path. In the end, the message is that macho violence is not going to stop us, it is going to make us inhabit the Internet and express ourselves.”
If you’d like to form your own coven to battle online sexism, Alerta Machitroll will share workshop materials to help you get started. The project is in need of a web developer to help integrate the localized content, and translators to make the campaign available in both English and Portuguese. The project is also seeking funding to help with the design of the machitroll typology. To get involved, contact the project on twitter @karisma, or via email at contacto@karisma.org.co.
