Moderation as Empowerment: Creating and Managing Women-Only Digital Safe Spaces

This paper explores the creation, management and moderation of women-only online groups as digital safe spaces. We interview eleven founders and moderators of six distinct, closed, women-only Facebook groups that predominantly cater to women in and from the Global South. The study provides insights into the motivations and mechanisms for creating and moderating these safe spaces, the affordances of social networking sites that enable or hinder the creation and moderation of such spaces and finally, and the deep impact moderating such spaces has on the women who manage them. Based on these findings we discuss suggestions for specific technological affordances to enable and support digital safe spaces for marginalized and vulnerable communities.