2017: The Year Women Reclaimed the Web

[Commentary] If there was one bright spot in all this darkness—one series of moments when the web actually did live up to the most optimistic expectations—it was that in the year 2017, women took back the very platforms that have been used to torment and troll them for so long, and built a new-wave women’s movement on top of them. The fundamental issues with social media—the divisiveness, the echo chambers, the lack of nuance, the bots—still plague it, in many cases more than ever. But in 2017, women also reminded us all of the upside of connecting online. Joining together around the world, they used these platforms the way the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world had originally hoped; they were able to find and support one another, despite geography and circumstance, and to subvert the power structures that have silenced them for so long. In 2017, women made the most of a deeply flawed system. Then again, what else is new?