Interview with Epifania Lo Presti

How can we use data to challenge inequality and build real tools for change?
Epifania Lo Presti, journalist and social communicator, takes us inside Elephant Talk—a European project that brings together education, advocacy, and digital culture to make gender-based violence online visible and to fight it effectively.

“Gathering data to dismantle gender-based hate speech” was the focus of your workshops within Elephant Talk, where participants learned how to collect data through a transfeminist and intersectional lens and how to counter gender-related hate speech online. What were the main insights that emerged? Could you give us a summary of those days?

The training sessions organized as part of the European project Elephant Talk were a valuable opportunity for exchange and collective learning. They focused on data collection and visualization as political and transformative practices. The project was conceived by Maghweb, the association I belong to, and developed in collaboration with social organizations from Croatia, Romania, Portugal, Greece, Slovenia, and Spain.
In Palermo and Athens, the workshops—preparatory to the launch of a European survey on the systemic phenomenon of online gender-based hate—were led by data experts and activists. They were aimed at youth workers and staff from European organizations working with young people, with the goal of equipping participants with skills to carry out international and collaborative data collection and visualization projects.
We explored the topic of open data and approached data collection and analysis from a transfeminist and intersectional perspective, a method designed to include diverse and marginalized voices while taking into account oppression, inequality, and cognitive biases.
The sessions also focused on misogynistic hate speech online, a form of violence that targets people based on their gender identity, undermining, intimidating, or silencing them—especially when they participate in public digital spaces or discuss issues related to transfeminism, human rights, or politics.

The program had a strong socio-political perspective and allowed us to analyze several emblematic case studies:

• Sonda Pride, the first mapping of accessibility and disability inclusion in Italian Pride events, created by graphic designer and data activist Simone Riflesso;

• Data production methods and experiences shared by data journalist and activist Alice Corona and open data expert Andrea Borruso.

Building on these concrete examples, we collectively designed one of the project’s most important tools: an accessible, multilingual survey aimed at collecting data both from those who experience gender-based hate online and from those who perpetuate it.
The survey had a dual purpose: to capture the complexity of online gender-based violence experiences, and to ensure it was usable by people from diverse cultural, linguistic, economic, and educational backgrounds. A transfeminist lens was central to the design, allowing us to move beyond binary and normative categories and include experiences related to misogyny, transphobia, racism, and ableism, often intertwined. The result is a questionnaire that not only gathers new data but also creates spaces for listening, recognition, and validation of marginalized voices.
In the coming months, we will focus on analyzing the collected data and presenting it to the European Parliament, along with recommendations for new digital policies to combat online gender-based violence. Our ambition is to contribute to structural change, ensuring that digital platforms and public institutions recognize the severity and pervasiveness of the problem and adopt concrete solutions based on the lived experiences of those who navigate digital spaces every day.

The concept of Data Feminism emphasizes that data are never neutral. So, how are data sometimes used or manipulated in ways that disadvantage women?

Although data have long been presented as powerful tools because of their supposed objectivity and neutrality, data feminism—the application of feminist principles and research to data science—teaches us that data have inherent limitations. When collected partially or with non-inclusive criteria, data can reinforce existing inequalities.
This happens, for example, when data are not disaggregated by gender, class, race, age, disability, or socioeconomic status, systematically excluding entire segments of the population. Examples include:

• Medical protocols based on the “standard male body”;

• Public transport systems that overlook the needs of caregivers;

• Even seemingly neutral census data, which can render entire communities—such as transgender and non-binary people or migrants—statistically invisible.

A striking example is the collection of femicide data in Italy. Official sources, such as the Ministry of the Interior, often focus only on judicial aspects or classify women’s murders under narrow criteria, failing to capture the structural dimension of patriarchal violence.
In this context, the work of the Osservatorio Femminicidi Lesbicidi Transcidi by Non Una Di Meno is particularly important. This independent, parallel data collection documents femicides that official institutions do not recognize, centering the stories, social contexts, and cultural mechanisms that fuel violence.

How can we ensure that digital data collection and use genuinely promote equity rather than reinforce stereotypes and discrimination?

Every act of counting and categorizing is influenced by political objectives, biases, and social expectations, making data neutrality an illusion. Yet we rely on data to understand phenomena, analyze them, and make strategic intervention decisions.
For this reason, it is essential to:

• Involve marginalized communities in data collection and analysis;

• Ask who is collecting the data, for what purposes, and who benefits from it;

• Value grassroots data collection and adopt an intersectional perspective.

These practices become powerful tools to challenge existing power dynamics, create alternative narratives, and carry out advocacy and awareness-raising actions.

In one of your articles, you talk about identities being stolen in public spaces. What are the main digital security and online identity risks that women face today?

For many women, being present online exposes them to concrete and structural risks. One major risk is unconscious profiling, where personal data, bodies, and identities are exploited, often for commercial purposes. This underlies practices like pinkwashing, where brands and institutions use inclusive language for marketing without a genuine commitment to protecting rights or ensuring digital safety. There is also a subtler, but equally pervasive, risk: the fear of speaking publicly, especially from a transfeminist or anti-racist perspective. Women who do—who fight for public space, civil rights, or social justice—can become targets of hate speech, body shaming, and personal discredit campaigns. These are deliberate strategies aimed at silencing, isolating, and delegitimizing those asserting their right to occupy digital spaces freely and visibly. Digital violence is never purely “virtual.” It has real effects on participation, psychological well-being, freedom of expression and self-determination, and the right to exist in public spaces without fear.

Many online attacks, such as doxxing and revenge porn, disproportionately target women. What strategies can we adopt to protect our digital identities?

In its educational programs on sexuality and relationships with young people—especially in schools—Maghweb often addresses the management of digital identity, with a particular focus on sharing personal content or intimate photos.
Through this work, we promote the use of basic digital self-defense tools, alongside collective reflection on consent and the importance of building relationships based on trust and respect. For instance, within a European project on youth political participation—which facilitated exchanges between young people from Europe and Latin America—an entire training pathway was dedicated to digital safety as a practice of “cyber-care.”
We believe that protecting one’s own and others’ online identity is an act of collective care, self-determination, and resistance against a culture of victim-blaming. It is a way to counter secondary victimization and strengthen practices of solidarity, support, and active peer intervention.

What role should digital platforms play in tackling these forms of online violence? And how can we push them to take greater responsibility?

The online platforms we inhabit—while offering spaces for freedom of expression—often reflect and even amplify the same power dynamics, discrimination, and violence present in society. Public conversations and online mobilization too often turn digital spaces into hostile environments, particularly for women, LGBTQIA+ people, people with disabilities, and other marginalized identities. In this sense, online violence is simply an extension of systemic sexism, ableism, and racism.

Platforms should take clear responsibility for monitoring, preventing, and countering these phenomena, but this requires deep changes to their governance and business models. This includes:

• More transparent moderation policies;

• Effective tools to protect users from abuse;

• Greater involvement of civil society in shaping rules and standards.

Civic pressure on these global actors can be an effective strategy, as already practiced by digital rights organizations.

At the same time, we can also act from the ground up:

• Building aware digital communities, including through media literacy programs in schools;

• Promoting practices of collective care;

• Applying pressure through actions such as boycotts, as recently happened with platform X, which was abandoned by many activists and collectives due to the prevalence of hate speech and disinformation.

How can data and digital technologies improve access to health information, especially in contexts where stigma and taboos still exist?

Scientific dissemination around sexual and reproductive rights is one of the main areas Maghweb focuses on. Through the ongoing project “Non è un veleno”, active since 2020, we have:

• Expanded access to information often surrounded by stigma, such as voluntary termination of pregnancy (IVG);

• Promoted educational programs on sexuality and relationships;

• Created maps of hospitals and pharmacies to identify obstacles and gaps in service access.

In our experience, the combination of verified scientific information and grassroots data collection has proven essential for building counter-narratives and overturning blaming narratives.
Most data collection focuses on people who choose to terminate a pregnancy—often stigmatized and judged—while information about facilities with high rates of conscientious objection or the actual number of objecting medical staff is not publicly available or easily accessible.
In Sicily, particularly in Palermo, we are working to fill this gap, which makes access to services more difficult. We share our database with organizations active in other parts of Italy and with people seeking information, helping circumvent institutional channels that are often lacking or outdated.