Grandma‘s Nipples on the Town Square: The Benefits of a Nordic Collaboration for Digital Rights

All over the Nordic region, we‘re enjoying the vast benefits of social media platforms that help us stay connected, organized and up to date – while also sharing the challenges that come with it. No Nordic country is exempt from cyberbullying or hate speech, and as much as we all swear we don‘t know anyone who would send a dickpic to a stranger, that pesky problem persists in all of our countries, too. (Ask any woman on Tinder.)

To complicate things, the companies that shape our online existence are far away, guided by cultural norms that sometimes overlap with those of the Nordic region, and sometimes differ from it, leaving us with little direct influence over our digital spheres.

"Free the nipple?" Icelandic mothers and aunts asked in astonishment in the spring of 2015, when young women and girls went topless and posted their naked chests to social media to challenge the rule that sees men‘s bare chests as a normal part of life, while the same part of a woman‘s body (and non-binary folks‘ depending on how they‘re perceived) is censored and taken down. „Since when are our nipples not free?“ they wondered, reminiscing about how they would go topless on good weather days in their youth while gardening, sunbathing at the pool or sprawled across the grassy lawn on the town square. They couldn‘t relate to their daughters' and granddaughters' sense of oppression, because after all, no law had been changed that policed women‘s breasts.

Except it had.

When social media became our new town square, with it came a set of laws in the form of community policies that dictate what we can and cannot do on the platforms. Like Icelandic women and ample-bosomed people would soon discover, we were now living under an imported moral code, invented and legislated by American men who censored our nipples and colonized our cultural norms, which up until then had not seen women’s bodies as lewd or inherently sexual. Young Icelandic women now felt the need to reclaim their bodies and take back ownership over something that had always belonged to us.

Meanwhile, abusers and bullies wasted no time harnessing the wide reach of social media to intimidate, slander and undermine their victims and opponents, with implications for the social fabric and democracy of our nations. Values that had been proudly heralded as “Nordic”, including gender-equality, openness and transparency, were now under threat. Nearly half of Swedish journalists reported that they had refrained from writing about controversial subjects such as immigration and feminism because of the online hate they knew they’d be subsequently subjected to. Women and minorities reported self-censorship to a scary degree after experiencing online abuse, particularly activists and politicians, and the so-called chilling effect ensured that countless more were silenced. In 2019, then 16-year-old climate-activist Greta Thunberg reported that her little sister had received death threats. She was thirteen years old.

In the tumult created by the arrival of the internet and social media upon our Nordic shores, groups and organizations were born that work towards protecting and furthering our digital rights. Some of these organizations have teamed up in the Game Changer project to safeguard the online wellbeing of Nordic youth. In 2024, we asked nearly a thousand teenagers and young adults in Finland, Sweden and Iceland what they would change if they were the boss of the internet. 71% of them said that cyberbullying and mean comments were among the most upsetting things online, with 56% specifically naming hate. They called for better tech solutions and more rules to protect user safety, as well as harsher consequences for those who break them. Their demand was loud and clear: We want a kinder, safer online world.

Fast forward a few months, to January 2025 when Mark Zuckerberg announced that protections against hate speech that had been in place on Meta platforms (which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) would now be removed in the name of “free speech”, which implies the debunked notion that hate speech furthers freedom, when multiple research shows that the opposite is true, because hate speech effectively silences vulnerable groups and thus undermines democracy. Among those directly affected are women and girls, who can now be called "property" on Meta platforms, and members of the LGBTQIA community, who can now be referred to as "mentally ill" and "immoral".

Removing protections for vulnerable communities on the world’s largest social media platforms directly contradicts the vision that our youth has for their digital future, and violates their right to grow up in a safe, supportive environment irrespective of their sexuality, origin, skin-color, gender identity, disability or religion, as safeguarded by Nordic law. It has never been more important to make a clear distinction between the rights we’ve established for our Nordic netizens, and the rollback of rights that is occurring on US-based social media platforms. The fields of digital rights, digital youth work and violence prevention in online spaces are underfunded and understaffed, marked by misconceptions that fail to see technologically facilitated abuse as “real”, and are thus blind to the urgency of the issue. At the heart of the Game Changer mission lies the understanding that together, we are stronger. As recent events underline, that mission has never been more important. Uniting our forces across borders and language areas increases our ability to protect and empower Nordic youth, maximizing our resources and exchanging best practices that help us create the digital future our youth demands – and deserves.