11.04.2026 –, Seminarraum 1 Sprache: English
Digital platforms are essential for feminist movements and increasingly hostile to them. Drawing on qualitative research with Mexican cyberfeminist activists, this talk shows how X algorithmically suppresses feminist speech, amplifies misogynist violence, and how activists develop collective strategies of resistance beyond platform control.
This talk is based on my Bachelor’s thesis Between Visibility and Disappearance and examines how Mexican cyberfeminist activists navigate algorithmic governance, platform capitalism, and digital gender-based violence on X (formerly Twitter).
In Mexico, around ten women are killed every day. Under these conditions, digital platforms are not neutral spaces but critical infrastructures for survival: they enable denunciation, memory, and collective mobilization. At the same time, the transformation of Twitter into X has intensified repression through opaque algorithms, “pay-to-play” visibility, dismantled moderation systems, and the normalization of misogynist and anti-feminist discourse.
Based on qualitative interviews with feminist activists, journalists, and human rights lawyers, the talk demonstrates how feminist visibility is structurally constrained while reactionary and authoritarian discourses are increasingly amplified. Algorithmic visibility is shown to be a political instrument rather than a technical one, deeply shaped by corporate interests and patriarchal power.
The talk also focuses on resistance: feminist counter-strategies such as collective networks, memory activism, careful visibility practices, cross-platform migration, and the creation of autonomous feminist media ecosystems. Rather than accepting Big Tech infrastructures as inevitable, the contribution invites feminist movements to rethink digital publics beyond capitalist and technocratic control.
Elisa Flores Weiss is a Mexican-German director and digital editor based between Berlin and Mexico City. Raised across Latin America, her perspective was shaped early on by journalism, political storytelling, and social movements. Her work grows out of long-term engagement with queer and feminist struggles in Mexico and a critical interest in how digital platforms govern visibility, amplify violence, and how collective resistance emerges under algorithmic control.