From Toxic to Tender: 7 Ways World Pulse Does Tech Differently

Lessons from a decade of feminist social network building

“Let me tell you how much this place, World Pulse, means to me. It is a haven of safety and support, a place where I can speak freely and without fear”

- World Pulse community member, Nisreen Eisay, Libya

Evidence of social networks harming humanity is everywhere. We now know that big tech platforms profit from personal data, worsen mental health, undermine democracy, and perpetuate disinformation and cyber violence. Few social networking platform models exist that are designed to make a positive difference, especially for the majority of the global population whose voices are underrepresented or under attack in the digital realm. From Meta to X to TikTok, there’s hardly a platform you don’t feel downright apprehensive about using.

Despite today’s tech dystopia, hopeful models are emerging. Over the past decade, as the founder of World Pulse, I’ve worked with a global collective of grassroots women from 200+ countries to carefully construct a different kind of social network. We consider our online platform an antidote to what’s known as toxic tech, something we fondly call tender tech.

Our members log on and find a healing environment for themselves and their communities, enabling them to multiply their impact as activists and community leaders and transform millions of lives. You could describe our journey as the opposite of the charging tech bro “Unicorn”: We go slow, build intentionally, center community care, and celebrate diverse voices.

Here’s how World Pulse does social networking technology differently.

1. From Trolling to Trusted Safe Space

Sadly, the online world is not friendly for most of humanity — and it’s only getting worse. For women, especially women of color or those with disabilities, online spaces can more closely resemble a war zone and site of trauma. Today, 52% of young women and girls have experienced online abuse, including sexual harassment, threatening messages, and having private images shared without permission. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, hate speech and racial slurs tripled and cyber attacks on LGBTQIA, women, and Black people increased. At the extreme, hate speech can lead to physical attacks and even genocide: Facebook’s lax moderation has been linked to genocide and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and Ethiopia.

From the beginning, World Pulse instituted a safeguarding policy of zero tolerance for demeaning or disrespectful language. Being tough on moderation at the beginning meant no trolling took hold. We were quick to block members who violated the policy, and this created a cycle of trust and freedom. Members felt they could open up and share vulnerable stories that you might not hear anywhere else.

It turns out a sense of safety was contagious. When new members came in and read authentic stories and the accompanying encouraging comments, they felt safer to share their own vulnerable stories. We heard over and over how revolutionary this was for members whose voices had been quashed in public or in their homes and those who were regularly being told they didn’t matter. Many shared that speaking up in their communities put them at risk for being ridiculed, silenced, or even killed. But World Pulse became their safe place.

We often say our comment section brings out the best of humanity. I can’t think of an online community that has the same gold standard of psychological safety that World Pulse has created. This standard of care enables women and underrepresented voices to freely express themselves.

2. From Harming to Healing Mental Health

“World Pulse is my go-to antidepressant” — World Pulse annual survey respondent

Most social network platforms have a negative overall effect on mental health, especially for young people. Studies show social media use has negative impacts on body image and sleep, increases instances of bullying and feelings of missing out, and leads to greater feelings of anxiety, depression, and loneliness.

The opposite is true on World Pulse. Members commonly cite that they joined World Pulse during dark periods of depression and that sharing and connecting on the platform has helped them to unburden themselves and feel less alone. So many women globally have suffered trauma, violence, and abuse but don’t feel they can speak about it. When members share on World Pulse and receive supportive comments and community care, it can contribute to a sense of wellbeing. And, when members find stories that they can relate to, it can help alleviate feelings of isolation and despair.

World Pulse community member Salma Malik of Pakistan told us that she found World Pulse at a low point in her life when she was considering suicide after experiencing unrelenting online attacks. “The blackmail I endured was so severe that I made my mind up to take my own life,” she said. “But after searching online I came across a post from World Pulse of a story similar to my case. I was encouraged and decided to live — and to stand up for my honor and the honor of women everywhere. Now, I have launched a cyberbullying legal clinic.”

Our community is built on the principles of collective care. We employ sensitive content warnings, utilize trauma-informed moderation practices, and allow members to indicate what they are seeking from each post they make, whether that’s moral support, visibility, connections, collaboration, or feedback. In our annual community surveys, year over year, 80 to 90% of respondents report feeling safe and heard and that World Pulse has contributed to a sense of increased resilience.

3. From Addiction to Restoration

Most online platforms are designed to keep you constantly coming back for more. Big tech designs features to manipulate the brain’s reward system to release dopamine and draw more users that will impact their bottom line. Their algorithms are rarely transparent and company success is typically measured in the infinite growth of the “Daily Active User” with the goal of getting more people glued to their phones every day.

At World Pulse, we center the whole wellness and life cycle of our members, typically women who have enormous pressures on their time: from caring for loved ones, juggling careers and community activism, raising families, or navigating health conditions. Our members are truly global and many log in from challenging contexts, including conflict zones. What matters to us is that we are there when she needs us, and when she does choose to participate — she is heard.

We’ve consciously designed an encouraging and welcoming culture with community leadership roles as “welcomers” and “encouragers” to ensure every voice is heard and warmly welcomed (or welcomed back after some time away). It takes courage to share your story online, and no voice goes unanswered. As one benchmark for feeling heard, we measure comments per post and strive to ensure every post receives multiple unique comments.

On principle we don’t use recommendation algorithms. Our members are in the driver’s seat and can select or unselect the types of topical content — from girl power to disability justice — they want to see in their feed.

At the same time, we develop features in response to community ideas and input. For example, members told us they wanted a way to recognize commenters who took the time to offer deeply meaningful and helpful comments, the kind that can be life-changing. Thus the “affirmed” comment was born. This feature gives authors the power to recognize those commenters who left messages that helped them feel especially valued and cared for. I can testify, it feels amazing as a commenter when an author affirms your response!

4. From Clicks-for-Profit to Connection-for-Impact

Let’s face it, for most online platforms profit is the main driver. The more activity and clicks the better it is for advertisers and investors. And, in the for-profit and non-profit sectors funders, investors, boards, and executives determine what to measure and what gets reported on. For us, our ultimate goal is social impact — not profit. Working with international researchers, we developed a Digital Empowerment Framework that documents how online access to greater voice, connection, and resources leads to our members taking more actions for social change.

We regularly survey the community to understand how connecting on World Pulse has created change in their lives and helped them further their community impact. From increased self-efficacy to increased belief in their ability to take action, members report that World Pulse has been valuable in their changemaking journeys.

Members also have the ability to self-report the impact they are creating in their communities via their World Pulse impact dashboards. This feature helps women leaders define the impact they want to create and tell the story of their impact journey through quantitative and qualitative data. They can use their mobile phones to submit their goals and update their progress in real-time.

World Pulse members report against impact goals spanning dozens of topics: They are creating bills to end violence against women, mobilizing for peace in Cameroon’s conflict zones, and building systems to address maternal health care in the South Bronx. They are bringing digital skills to adolescent girls in India, distributing menstrual health products in Nepal, and leading efforts to put an end to extractive mining in Kenya. Collectively, members have identified that they want to impact more than 100 million lives through their initiatives.

5. From “Move Fast and Break Things” to “Move Intentionally and Build Responsibly”

Our approach emphasizes thoughtful and deliberate actions, prioritizing long-term sustainability, ethical considerations, and user well-being over rapid development and potential negative consequences. Unicorns and big tech churn through capital to fuel hypergrowth at all costs with a culture to disrupt and apologize later. This can lead to irresponsible and unethical behaviors.

World Pulse consciously chose a path of organic growth over the past decade. We focused on listening to our members, growing the deep roots of a trusted global community, building responsive programs, and a resilient cross-border culture. With lean resources as a nonprofit, we chose investments in platform and community programs versus marketing for growth. This path proved to be slower but more durable.

To augment our platform and be responsive to community requests, we developed digital trainings and Story Awards programs. Many of our members were newer to technology and wanted to better learn skills to meaningfully and safely participate and tell their stories online. We built multiple ways to listen to members through online content moderation, surveys, community members sharing insights with the board, and reviewing engagement data.

It’s not been easy to reconcile agile methodology and technological “sprints” where you need to test and learn quickly. We’ve had to work to create a “mixology” of agile and centering community care and community ownership of the platform they have come to rely on. It is of utmost importance to us not to replicate the bro playbook of moving too fast and breaking things. We have to still move at the speed of care — we will not break trust.

6. From Patriarchal to Intersectional, Inclusive Leadership

It all makes sense why tech has gone so wrong when you look at who’s been building it. The biggest social platforms have been born from the minds of white men, from Jack Dorsey’s Twitter (now Elon Musk’s X), to Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian, and Aaron Swartz’s Reddit, and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Today they are still mostly helmed by male executives with command-and-control leadership.

On the other hand, the majority of World Pulse’s board, staff, and advisors are woman-identified. This has resulted in an organization that focuses internally on collaborative leadership, including rotating facilitation at the leadership table. Our board is fiercely competent in their legal and fiduciary role, while fostering laughter and loving support for each other and the organization as a whole. Our team policies include social wellness days, bereavement, flexible schedules, and a culture where team members jump in to support their colleagues so that no one is left out and everyone is supported.

It is important to us that World Pulse is not only women-led but also community-powered. We have built participatory tools and structures to give the community opportunities to advise the team on our strategic plans and on ethical research and evaluation efforts. This includes a newly formed Research and Evaluation Group composed of community leaders who provide guidance on any research World Pulse conducts or any research requests World Pulse receives.

In addition, our board bylaws mandate community board seats and community leaders formally meet with and advise the board multiple times a year. We have recently begun a process to develop a shared governance structure with an influential community leadership board to represent the wider community and recommend how to shift power to the most excluded voices.

7. From Charity to Solidarity

When I started World Pulse I was often questioned by mostly white women in the US who were concerned about the implications of an open international network. Familiar with notorious online scams from Nigeria, they asked what to do if they joined World Pulse and were directly solicited by women or fraudsters in other countries for money. They were used to writing checks as “charity” for causes supporting women in other parts of the world, but being directly in dialogue with someone from another country was intimidating!

We believed that the true transformation would come with understanding each other’s stories and building reciprocal relationships in community. That reality has come to pass: deep relationships have formed across borders resulting in moral support, lifelong friendships, and direct funding for community programs, and educational opportunities.

We also built a community giving program. “Changefunders” can deposit small amounts of money into our Change Fund which provides honorariums for story contests and technology stipends for online organizing. Instead of a cold transaction, donors are able to stay connected and follow recipients journeys online! We have disseminated hundreds of micropayments to women across the world with no strings attached, trusting that they will use the funds in the way that is best for them. Members themselves from countries like the Philippines and Cameroon have even contributed to the Change Fund citing a desire to give back to their sisters.

Ironically, many Nigerian women tell us how miraculous these funds have been for investing in their communities. And they share how they go to cyber cafes to log on to World Pulse where they sit beside so-called “Yahoo Boys” committing online fraud. They say World Pulse is one online place where they won’t be discriminated against because they are Nigerian.

We’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible.

I’ve been steeped in feminist social networking for a decade, and I believe this is a pivotal moment. New innovations and emergent online platforms, communities, and tools are poised to unlock the voices and leadership of billions of women — voices that are still too buried today by oppressive systems and social norms. I can confidently say — it’s already happening.

At World Pulse, our mission is clear. It’s our job to crank up the volume on these often-unheard voices and support their connections through transformational communications technology so that they can become an unstoppable, vibrant collective force for equality: quiet no more, loudly roaring with life.

The beauty of this future is that it is woven from multitudes of new visions that will rise and shape our future — a future that no AI algorithm born of the male-dominated toxic tech of today can predict.