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This entry outlines the ways in which feminist activists have responded to gendered abuse online. Online abuse is disproportionately targeted toward women and is characterized as particularly gendered as it targets their gender, appearance, and sexuality. This abuse can take the form of trolling, hate speech, rape and death threats, and image‐based sexual abuse. As the internet provided a space for online abuse it simultaneously created a platform for feminist activists to challenge this abuse. This entry outlines the variety of digital feminist activism which allows for women to document and share their experiences of abuse and to draw attention to the problem. The type of digital activism varies throughout the world and often draws attention to offline issues of rape, sexual abuse, and sexual assault. Through a number of examples of famous hashtags, it is shown how hashtag activism enables women to draw attention to a specific issue and discuss this collectively under a hashtag. A more individualist approach to digital feminist activism is that of digital vigilantism, or digilantism, in which individual women call out, shame, and ridicule online abusers and men's rights activists—often using humor as a means of communication. Finally, digital feminist activism functions as a counter‐narrative to mainstream media discourse and the entry discusses the potential for social change for the various strategies of digital feminist activism.

This paper investigates the discursive construction of sexual violence in humorous Internet memes. Feminist digital media scholars have taken an increased interest in the ways in which Internet communication and content reproduces notions of gender norms as well as creating misogynist, racist, homophobic and transphobic content. However, little research has investigated the role humour plays in this discourse – especially how it is presented in Internet memes. Using #MeToo as a case study, the paper investigates the role of humour in memes that focus on sexual violence. Investigating how gender and sexuality are discursively constructed in memes, the paper focuses on how this plays into the representation of sexual violence. The paper asks: what can Internet scholars learn by taking Internet humour seriously? The key findings of this paper is the discursive construction of sexual violence and the role humour plays in this. A himpathetic (Manne 2018) logic runs through most of the memes which centralises men’s experiences and provides disproportionate sympathy with male perpetrators and widely disregards the experiences of female victims. Humour is used to signal inclusion and exclusion as the platforms become spaces for indicating and reaffirming heteronormativity and homosociality. The work done by humour discursively excludes women, sexual minorities and people of colour. This exclusion extends to victim/survivors who often become the butt of the joke and are used as a prop to create a humorous meme.

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