Collective Shout Releases Two Reports Detailing Online Abuse Following Its Anti-Violent Games Campaign
- Sagar Mankar
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Australian advocacy group Collective Shout launched two new reports on August 12, 2026, at Parliament House in Canberra (Australia).
The documents analyse what the organisation describe as "a large-scale, coordinated wave of tech-facilitated violence" against its all-women team, following the group’s successful 2025 efforts to restrict certain adult games on major platforms.
Who Is Collective Shout?
Collective Shout is a grassroots movement founded back in 2010. Its whole mission is fighting the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls in media, advertising, and pop culture.
The group made headlines in 2025 after flagging hundreds of games on Steam and Itch.io. Most of these titles depicted or simulated rape, incest, sexual torture, and child sexual abuse material.
When the platforms dragged their feet, Collective Shout switched tactics. They went straight to payment processors like Visa and Mastercard, pushing them to enforce their own terms of service against this kind of content.
That pressure worked. Hundreds, and by some counts thousands, of titles were pulled from both platforms in July 2025. Broader temporary restrictions on adult content followed while audits took place. Collective Shout called it one of their biggest wins of the year.
What Happened After The Win?
The backlash was immediate and brutal. Activists say they received rape and death threats. Personal details and home addresses were doxxed and published online. There were attempts to disrupt the group's email, social media, and financial systems.
Things got even darker with the creation and spread of AI-generated deepfake pornography and violent imagery featuring team members. False claims linking the group to paedophilia or extremism also spread fast across platforms.
United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls Reem Alsalem characterised the volume and nature of the abuse as “the most serious form of online violence against women human rights defenders I have seen in a long time.”
Australian Federal Police and other agencies have investigated aspects of the campaign, though activists have reported limited progress more than a year later.
The main 135-page report is titled "Technology Facilitated Violence Against Women: Documentation and analysis of online abuse targeting Collective Shout." It was produced by the Online Hate Prevention Institute and authored by Dr Patrick Scolyer-Gray.
It frames the events as extending far beyond ordinary policy disagreement into a "large-scale, multi-vector, coordinated campaign" driven centrally by misogyny, amplified by disinformation, and enabled by platform dynamics. Key findings include the role of distorted narratives in legitimising hostility, similarities to earlier decentralised harassment episodes such as Gamergate, failures by platforms to remove abusive content effectively, and attempts to undermine the group’s operational capacity.
A shorter 16-page companion report, "We are coming for you: The impact of the global cyber terror attacks against the women of Collective Shout," takes a more personal angle. It comes from the five-woman Campaign Strategy Team and details their lived experience of the threats, image-based abuse (including material reportedly generated with tools such as xAI’s Grok), and the practical difficulties of seeking redress through platforms, regulators, and law enforcement.
Both reports stress the “chilling effect” on women’s participation in public debate and call for stronger online safety measures.
The recommendations are extensive. They call for treating misogyny as a form of gender-based hate speech subject to platform action. There's also a push to recognise coordinated misinformation that fuels these pile-on attacks as a distinct and serious harm.
Other suggestions include better responses to AI-enabled image-based abuse and stronger regulatory tools for quick action against large-scale harassment campaigns.
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