Consider what happened to dozens of women across Bangladesh during the political transition of 2024. Photographs were taken from their social media profiles, digitally altered to place their faces on explicit imagery, and spread widely online. Fabricated stories about their personal lives circulated through WhatsApp groups in their home communities. Threats flooded their inboxes. Many stopped posting. Some withdrew from public roles entirely.
This is technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV): the deliberate use of digital tools to intimidate, humiliate, and exclude. According to the National Violence Against Women Survey 2024, more than five out of every hundred Bangladeshi women reported experiencing it. Among women aged 20 to 24, that figure rises to one in six.
The methods follow a recognisable pattern. Deepfakes (digitally altered images or videos that make it appear someone said or did something they never said or did) destroy reputations. Coordinated trolling, where organised groups flood a target’s accounts with abuse, makes online engagement feel impossible. Sexualised smear campaigns spread false, sexually explicit content to drive people offline permanently. These tools are deployed strategically against women who have stepped into public life, in politics, journalism, activism, or civic society.
The aim is to make a public voice feel too costly. Around Bangladesh’s 13th national election in February 2026, researchers documented that more than 74 percent of online misinformation was politically motivated, and one in six posts surveyed contained hate speech. This is organised pressure, designed to shape who gets to participate in public life.
The consequences extend well beyond the screen. When someone is publicly humiliated online, the damage follows them offline: into their community, their workplace, their family. Evidence from across Bangladesh shows that online hatred frequently precedes and accompanies physical intimidation and violence, particularly around elections. When targeted groups are effectively silenced, democracy loses the very diversity of voices that it depends on.
Bangladesh is navigating this challenge at a pivotal moment, and its government is leading the response. Through the Cyber Security Ordinance, 2025 and the forthcoming National AI Policy 2026-2030, the country is building the legal architecture for a safer digital environment. The United Nations in Bangladesh supports this national agenda, drawing on the UN secretary-general’s 2019 plan of action on hate speech, a global framework that commits the entire UN system to understand, prevent, and respond to speech that incites discrimination, hostility, or violence, while protecting legitimate expression. This effort is also embedded in the UN’s gender equality action plan political strategy, which calls for coordinated action against hate speech and disinformation as part of the commitment to women’s rights and equal participation.
Beyond targeting individuals, misinformation and disinformation erode the social fabric. Misinformation is inaccurate content spread without deliberate intent; disinformation is deliberately fabricated to deceive. Both spread far faster online than corrections do. In Bangladesh, false stories about religious and ethnic minorities have repeatedly circulated ahead of elections and public events, stoking fear and suspicion between communities. When people cannot distinguish fact from fabrication, hostility fills the gap, and what begins online surfaces in neighbourhoods, at polling stations, and sometimes in violence.
This year marks the fifth International Day for Countering Hate Speech, themed “The power of partnerships,” and Bangladesh is putting that principle into practice. No single actor can solve this alone. The government sets the agenda; the UN contributes data, expertise, and convening power to bring together actors who would not otherwise coordinate. Together, they work to align laws like the Cyber Security Ordinance, 2025 and the forthcoming National AI Policy 2026-2030 with international human rights standards, so that measures against hate speech cannot be misused to silence journalists or suppress dissent.
In practice, this partnership supports protection for those most at risk—women politicians, journalists, human rights defenders, and minority activists—through digital security assistance, legal referrals, and psychosocial support for those already targeted. It also means ensuring women have a voice in cybersecurity policymaking, because when they are absent, the resulting policies tend to overlook the specific ways women are targeted online.
That is why others must join in this effort. Media organisations need to examine practices that amplify harmful content in the pursuit of engagement. Technology companies must invest in content moderation in Bangla and Bangladesh’s indigenous languages. Regulatory authorities need the mandate and capacity to act before incitement turns into violence. Even civil society and youth movements have a critical role in refusing to normalise harassment as the price of participation.
Bangladesh’s political transition has opened new civic space, already under pressure from organised efforts to silence and exclude. The cost of inaction is measured in women who withdraw from public life, minorities who do not report abuse, journalists who self-censor, and the erosion of trust that healthy societies require.
Making online spaces safer is not about restricting speech. It is about ensuring that everyone, regardless of gender, religion, or ethnicity, can exercise the freedom to speak without fear. That is not a secondary concern. It is the foundation on which democratic participation and sustainable development depend.
Carol Flore-Smereczniak is resident coordinator ad interim of the United Nations in Bangladesh.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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