The internet has steadily become a place where our worst impulses are openly flaunted and amplified.

Abuse travels faster than truth. Exploitation hides behind anonymity. Entire ecosystems now exist to profit from harm—especially sexual harm, humiliation, and violation. What used to be fringe is now normalised, searchable, monetised, and often algorithmically pushed.

This isn’t an accident. It’s the result of systems built to reward attention at any cost.

We’ve created a space where cruelty scales, accountability is absent, and harm is treated as content. Once something enters this system, it spreads and stays. The voices against such cruelty and harm are trolled and suppressed with relentless bullying and state power.

Cleaning up the internet is no longer optional. It is essential to preserving civilisation.

This doesn’t mean censorship or control. It means setting minimum standards for what a functioning society should guarantee:

No open markets for abuse
No platforms built on exploitation
No profit from harm

If we are serious about building a better society, we cannot ignore the digital layer that now shapes how people think, behave, and interact with one another.

Right now, that layer is broken.

If we leave it as it is, everything built on top of it—politics, social and personal relationships, culture—will see further toxification.

At The Change Project, we are launching a sustained campaign—Change The Internet—against online materials that cause undeniable harm.

While in the long run, this speaks directly to the urgent need for governing the internet better (as we have discussed here), such an effort can be initiated using existing laws that were instated to prevent or prosecute harm.

It is predictable that some will raise the spectre of government overreach in response to this campaign. But our stand remains that fighting governmental abuse of power and toxic, violent “content” online go hand in hand, and both are an integral part of our work.

Updates on the campaign will be shared on this website and through our social media.