Her Afghanistan: When Words Become Walls

  • The Moderation Gap

    Much of the abuse aimed at Afghan women online stays up because the systems built to remove it cannot fully read it. The previous entry in this series examined what online hate speech costs Afghan women: deleted accounts, abandoned work, and voices withdrawn from public life. That raises an obvious question. If platforms prohibit harassment…

    Sienna Park

  • The Cost of Speaking Up

    Hate speech against Afghan women is not only a set of words. It is a price attached to being seen, and many women are paying it by being silenced. How the abuse arrives After the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, street protests were often suppressed. Social media, especially X, became one of the…

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  • Hate Speech Online and Offline

    We are not new to hate speech, but the rooms it happens in have changed. For most of history, a slur had to be spoken face-to-face, shouted across a street, or printed on a flyer. Today, the same words can be typed in seconds, seen by thousands, and shared with millions. It is tempting to…

    Sienna Park

  • Hate Speech Against Afghan Girls

    Since the fall of Kabul in 2021, Afghan girls and women have been barred from secondary school and university and pushed out of most public life; they are not allowed to enter the workforce or, to be realistic, even to set foot outside their homes without a man. So what is there left to do?…

    Sienna Park