‘Don’t pander to the tech giants!’ How a youth movement for digital justice is spreading across Europe

The digital landscape, once heralded as a beacon of connection and progress, has increasingly revealed its darker underbelly, particularly for the generation that grew up alongside its rapid evolution. This is the story of a burgeoning youth movement, born from personal outrage and growing into a collective demand for accountability from the tech giants shaping their lives.

The Genesis of a Movement: #StopFisha Confronts Online Shame

It was late one night in April 2020, amidst the unsettling quiet of the early Covid-19 lockdowns, when Shanley Clémot McLaren, then 21, stumbled upon a disturbing reality. Scrolling through her phone, she noticed a Snapchat post from her 16-year-old sister. The video showed her sister, visibly upset, warning peers about "fisha accounts." "Guys you shouldn’t be doing this. These fisha accounts are really not OK. Girls, please protect yourselves," her sister urged. Shanley, feeling a sudden disconnect from her younger sibling's digital world, wondered, "What is fisha?"

Her sister's explanation unveiled a horrifying phenomenon: Snapchat accounts named "fisha" followed by the code of their Paris suburb. "Fisha," a French slang term derived from the verb "afficher" (to display or make public), referred to the public shaming of individuals. These accounts, her sister revealed, contained not only intimate images of girls from their school and dozens of others but also a chilling array of personal data: names, phone numbers, addresses – "everything to find them, everything to put them in danger." It was a stark, immediate threat to the safety and privacy of young women.

The initial response to this egregious violation was met with frustrating silence. McLaren, her sister, and their friends diligently reported the accounts to Snapchat, dozens of times, yet received no acknowledgment or action. This inaction, however, only fueled their resolve. They soon discovered that this wasn't an isolated incident; "fisha" accounts were proliferating across different suburbs, towns, and cities throughout France and beyond, a silent epidemic of digital harassment.

Faced with the apparent impunity of social media platforms and their glaring lack of moderation, McLaren and her network decided to fight back. They launched the hashtag #StopFisha. What began as a local outcry quickly went viral, resonating across online communities and capturing the attention of traditional media. #StopFisha transformed into more than just a hashtag; it became a powerful rallying cry, a safe space for victims to share information and seek advice, and a burgeoning protest movement. The wave of online shaming was met with a powerful counter-wave, turning the tables on the social media companies themselves. As McLaren, now 26, reflects, "The wave became a counter-wave."

The widespread public pressure eventually spurred action. The French government launched an online campaign to educate the public on the dangers and legal consequences of "fisha" accounts. Crucially, the social media companies, previously unresponsive, began to moderate content more actively. Today, #StopFisha holds the status of a "trusted flagger" with Snapchat and TikTok, enabling them to report "fisha" content and see it removed within hours. This success taught McLaren a vital lesson: "I realised that if you want change in your societies, if you come with your idea alone, it won’t work. You need support behind you."

From Local Outcry to a Pan-European Digital Justice Movement

Four years on, this strategy of collective action is playing out on an even grander scale. Shanley McLaren and other young activists across Europe are uniting against the pervasive and often ruinous effects of social media on their generation. Individually, young people might feel powerless against the monolithic influence of big tech corporations. However, as a demographic that constitutes a substantial part of these companies' business models, their collective voice holds immense power.

This generation is unique: they are the first to have grown up entirely immersed in social media, making them both its earliest adopters and, consequently, the first to experience the full spectrum of its harms. The problems are not only diverse but constantly expanding: from misogynistic, hateful, and disturbing content to addictive and skewed algorithms that manipulate user behavior. Issues like invasion of privacy, online forums encouraging self-harm, sextortion, screen addiction, deepfake pornography, misinformation, disinformation, radicalization, surveillance, and biased AI are just some of the challenges they face daily.

The correlation between the rise of social media use and a corresponding increase in youth mental health problems is stark. Anxiety, depression, self-harm, and even suicide rates have seen alarming upticks. A recent report from People vs Big Tech – a coalition comprising over 140 digital rights NGOs from across Europe – and its youth-led spin-off, Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim, starkly states, "Across Europe, a generation is suffering through a silent crisis." A significant contributing factor, the report concludes, is "the design and dominance of social media platforms."

Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim, specifically designed for individuals aged 15 to 29, emerged in September of the previous year. Paradoxically, People vs Big Tech issued a call for participation on social media platforms themselves. This outreach brought together approximately 20 young people already actively engaged in these issues for a "boot camp" in London. McLaren, who attended with her partner, recalls, "We were really given the tools to create the movement that we wanted to build. They booked a big room, they brought the food, pencils, paper, everything we needed. And they were like: ‘This is your space, and we’re here to help.’"

This collaborative effort has resulted in Europe’s first digital justice movement led by and for young people. Their demands are refreshingly straightforward, or at least they ought to be: the inclusion of young people in decision-making processes; the creation of a safer, healthier, and more equitable social media environment; greater control and transparency over personal data and its usage; and an end to the monopolistic stranglehold a handful of US-based corporations exert over social media and online spaces. The overarching principle guiding their mission is clear: "Nothing for us, without us."

"This is not just us being angry; it’s us having the right to speak," asserts McLaren, who now serves as a youth mobilisation lead for Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim. While debates surrounding digital rights are ongoing, she finds it "really unfair that we’re not at the table. Young people have so much to say, and they’re real experts, because they have lived experience… So why aren’t they given the proper space?"

The Multifaceted Harms: Personal Stories and Systemic Flaws

McLaren’s initial work with #StopFisha opened her eyes to a wider, murkier world of gender-based digital rights abuses: misogynist trolling, sexism, cyberstalking, and deepfake pornography. Yet, she soon realized this was merely one facet of a much larger, systemic problem. The online harms experienced by women were mirrored, in different forms, by other marginalized groups.

Intersectionality of Digital Harm: The Migrant and Queer Experience

Yassine, a 23-year-old activist originally from North Africa and now living in Germany, deeply understands this intersectionality. Identifying as non-binary, Yassine fled to Europe seeking refuge from intolerance in their home country. However, the reality of life, even in a supposedly liberal nation like Germany, was a "slap," as they describe it. "You’re here for your safety, but then you’re trying to fight not only the system that is punishing the queerness of you, but you also have another layer of being a migrant. So you have two battles instead of one."

As a migrant, Yassine explains, they are often perceived as a threat. "Our bodies and movements must be tracked, fingerprinted and surveilled through intrusive digital systems designed to protect the EU." For queer individuals, similar challenges abound. "Shadow-banning," for instance, is a common experience where tech platforms "silence conversations about queer rights, racism or anything that is challenging the dominant system," either through deliberate moderation policies or algorithmic biases built into the system.

Measures like identity verification, while sometimes implemented for legitimate security reasons, can also "put a lot of people at risk of being erased from these spaces," Yassine notes. These systems often present binary gender options (male or female), discriminating against non-binary or transgender individuals. They also pose significant barriers for refugees and undocumented people, who may be afraid or unable to submit their personal details online due to their precarious residency status, limited digital literacy, or lack of access to necessary documentation. Consequently, migrants often feel compelled to remain silent. "It definitely feels like you are in a position of: ‘You need to be grateful that you are here, and you should not question the laws.’ But the laws are harming my data."

On a daily basis, Yassine must "walk through online spaces knowing they could do harm to me." Clicking on comments under a social media post, for example, often exposes them to racist, homophobic, or hateful attacks. Like McLaren, Yassine finds complaining to platforms futile. "I know that they will come back with, ‘This is not a community guidelines breach,’ and all of that." These are not mere glitches, Yassine argues, now leading digital rights at IGLYO, a long-running LGBTQ+ youth rights organization based in Brussels. "The systems we design inherit the very structures they arise from, so they inevitably become systems that are patriarchal and racist by design."

The Mental Health Crisis and Algorithmic Addiction

Adele Zeynep Walton’s path to Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim was tragically personal. In 2022, her 21-year-old sister, Aimee, took her own life. Aimee had been struggling with her mental health, but had also been spending significant time on online suicide and self-harm forums, which Walton believes tragically contributed to her death. This profound loss led Walton to deeply question the digital realm she had grown up in and confront her own screen addiction.

Walton’s parents created her first Facebook account when she was just 10; she joined Instagram at 12. Her own struggles with body dysmorphia began at 13, sparked by pro-anorexia content shared by her friends. "I became a consumer of that, then I got immersed in this world," she recounts. "Generations like mine thought it was totally normal, having this everyday battle with this addictive thing, having this constant need for external validation. I thought those were things that were just wrong with me."

While researching her book, "Logging Off: The Human Cost of our Digital World," Walton, 26, further realized the alarming lack of control young people have over the content algorithmically served to them. "We don’t really have any choice over what our feeds look like. Despite the fact there are things where you can say, ‘I don’t want to see this type of content,’ within a week, you’re still seeing it again."

The Ethical Void in Algorithm Design

Alycia Colijn, 29, another member of Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim, brings a unique perspective as a data scientist. She studied data science and marketing analytics at university in Rotterdam, researching AI-driven algorithms – specifically how they can be used to manipulate behavior and in whose interests. During her studies, a critical question arose: "It’s weird that I’m trained to gather as much data as I can, and to build a model that can respond to or predict what people want to buy, but I’ve never had a conversation around ethics."

Now, as co-founder of Encode Europe, which advocates for human-centric AI, Colijn actively researches these ethical issues. "I realised how much power these algorithms have over us; over our society, but also over our democracies," she states. "Can we still speak of free will if the best psychologists in the world are building algorithms that make us addicted?" The more she learned, the more concerned Colijn became. "We made social media into a social experiment," she laments. "It turned out to be the place where you could best gather personal data from individuals. Data turned into the new gold, and then tech bros became some of the most powerful people in the world, even though they aren’t necessarily known for caring about society."

Power Dynamics: Big Tech, Governments, and the Fight for Accountability

Social media companies have had numerous opportunities to address these myriad harms, yet they have consistently chosen not to. Just as McLaren discovered with Snapchat and the "fisha" accounts, hateful and racist content continues to be minimally moderated on platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube. Following Donald Trump’s re-election, Mark Zuckerberg announced at the start of this year that Meta would be reducing fact-checkers across Facebook and Instagram, mirroring similar actions taken by X under Elon Musk. This reduction has demonstrably facilitated the free flow of misinformation and disinformation.

Furthermore, Meta, Amazon, and Google were among the companies announcing the rollback of their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives post-Trump’s election. This political shift towards the right in both the US and Europe has, according to Yassine, inevitably affected these platforms’ tolerance of hateful and racist content. "People feel like now they have more rights to be harmful than rights to be protected," they observe. All the while, tech CEOs have amassed unprecedented power – economically, politically, and in terms of information control. "We don’t believe that power should be in those hands," Colijn asserts. "That’s not a true democracy."

Political Will and the Knowledge Gap

Europe’s politicians, despite some legislative efforts, are not faring much better. While the Digital Services Act (DSA) was drafted in 2023, threatening social media companies with substantial fines or bans for failing to regulate harmful content, the European Commission recently announced a concerning rollback of some data privacy laws. This move would allow big tech companies to use people’s personal data for training AI systems, raising significant privacy concerns. "Big tech, combined with the AI innovators, say they are the growth of tomorrow’s economy, and that we have to trust them. I don’t think that’s true," Colijn argues. She also strongly disagrees with the industry's assertion that regulation stifles innovation. "The only thing deregulation fosters is harmful innovation. If we want responsible innovation, we need regulation in place."

Walton echoes this sentiment, expressing frustration with governmental inaction. "Governments and MPs are shooting themselves in the foot by pandering to tech giants, because that just tells young people that they don’t care about our future," she states. "There’s this massive knowledge gap between the people who are making the decisions, and the tech justice movement and everyday people who are experiencing the harms."

Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim: A Vision for a Reclaimed Digital Future

Crucially, Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim is not advocating for the wholesale destruction of social media. These activists acknowledge that online spaces have also fostered community, solidarity, and joy. "We’re fighting for these spaces to accommodate us," Yassine explains. "We’re not protesting to cancel them. We know how harmful they are, but they are still spaces where we have hope."

Colijn shares this perspective, recalling the initial promise of the internet. "Social media used to be a fun place with the promise of connecting the world," she says. "That’s where we started." And that, ultimately, is what they aspire for it to be again.

Strategies for Change: From Legislation to Logging Off

Will big tech finally pay attention? They might not have a choice, as countries and legislators begin to take concrete action. This week, Australia is set to become the first country to ban social media accounts for under-16s on major platforms including Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, and X. Last week, after a two-year deliberation, X was fined €120 million (£105 million) by the EU for breaching data laws. Yet, despite these penalties, these companies continue to platform content that is hateful, racist, harmful, misleading, or inflammatory, often with apparent impunity.

Meanwhile, Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim is just getting started. Discussions are underway for campaigning for an EU-funded social media platform, an alternative to the current big tech oligopoly, created by and for the public. Another avenue is direct action, whether through organized protests or consumer activism such as coordinated boycotts. "I think it’s lazy for us to be like: we don’t have any power," Walton asserts. "Because we could literally say that about anything: fast fashion, fossil fuels… OK, but how do we change things?"

The other powerful alternative, and one gaining increasing traction, is simply to log off. "The other side of the coin to this movement of tech justice, and a sort of liberation from the harms that we’ve experienced over the past 20 years, is reducing our screen time," Walton explains. "It is spending more time in community. It is connecting with people who maybe you would have never spoken to on social media, because you’d be in different echo chambers."

Almost all the activists involved in Ctrl+Alt+Reclaim admit to having experienced some form of screen addiction themselves. As much as social media has brought them together in this movement, it has also, ironically, led to a significant reduction in face-to-face socializing. "I’ve had to sort of rewire my brain to get used to the awkwardness and get comfortable with being in a social setting and not knowing anyone," Walton shares. "Actually, it would be really nice to return to proper connection." The fight for digital justice, it seems, is also a fight for genuine human connection in an increasingly mediated world.

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• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie.
• In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14.
• Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
• In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111.
• In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org.
• In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978.