From EU Regulation to Italian Integration: the Framing of Online Misogyny in the Digital Services Act

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how online misogyny is framed within European governance and how this framing is reproduced at the national level in Italy. While online misogyny is defined by academic literature as a structural form of gender-based violence, it remains understudied whether digital governance frameworks explicitly acknowledge this issue. Drawing on Feminist IR theory, this study analyzes how regulatory discourse constructs online harm and how gendered power relations are embedded within governance frameworks. The research focuses on the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and its integration in Italy, and examines regulatory documents adopted by the Italian Digital Services Coordinator (DSC), including AGCOM report from 2024 and two official regulations. Using qualitative discourse analysis, the study investigates how online harm is defined, how users are constructed and whether gender-based violence is explicitly addressed. The findings show that both the DSA and the Italian governance frameworks rely on gender-neutral, risk-based language that frames online harm through broad categories such as illegal content, systemic risks and user protection. The analysis demonstrates that online misogyny is included only under these broad categories, which in turn makes gendered violence invisible within digital governance. By examining multi-level digital governance through a feminist IR lens, this research contributes to debates on platform regulation, gendered violence and assumptions of neutrality in transnational digital spaces.