Living a little more analog
I recently had a conversation with my sister about how maybe 2026 is the year we go back to analog. Back to days when we spent more time flipping through the pages of a book than scrolling through screens. Back to having conversations at the dinner table without the distraction of our phones. Back to slow, more intentional days.
Today, most of our work demands that we check countless group chats across countless messaging apps. While I’ve necessarily adapted to this rhythm, I still feel uneasy about how overly ubiquitous technology has become in our daily lives.
Don’t get me wrong—I recognize and appreciate what technology, especially the internet, has made possible. It has enabled small enterprises to grow, creators to build platforms, and communities to find one another. It has democratized access in ways that once seemed unimaginable.
Unfortunately, I have also seen how technology has been weaponized—rapidly and repeatedly—against our most vulnerable: our women and children.
In the Senate, when we started investigating how the rise of Philippine offshore gaming operators (Pogos) was related to the surge in prostitution, we uncovered how messaging platforms like WeChat were used to display women on literal online “menus,” complete with prices and listed sexual services—many of them trafficked into the country to service Chinese Pogo workers. Women were reduced to commodities. Women were made to look like food.
As we continued examining the social harms linked to Pogos, we discovered another pattern: Filipinos trafficked into scam hubs in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos were recruited with alarming ease through social media and networking apps. The speed and scale of these criminal operations have been made disturbingly efficient by technology.
Our hearings on the Anti-Online Sexual Abuse and Exploitation of Children (OSAEC) law also revealed shocking, heartbreaking, and enraging stories.
I remember one victim-survivor—”Ruby”—who testified that at 16 years old, she was contacted through Facebook Messenger by a stranger who offered her a job at a computer shop. Food and accommodations, all free. An orphan desperate for work, she agreed. Soon after, she found herself trapped in a house with other women, forced to strip in front of a computer for foreign customers abroad.
In another hearing to amend the Anti-OSAEC law and the Safe Spaces Act to include harassment, abuse, and exploitation committed through emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), our resource persons laid bare the cruelty of tech-powered abuse: apps and websites that could digitally undress images of our women and girls; encrypted messaging platforms that make monitoring exploitative transactions increasingly difficult; images and videos stolen and then transformed into sexual materials without consent.
Queen Hera, a mother and content creator, testified how the image of her child was manipulated and edited to insert a man’s private parts, then sold online. Actress Angel Aquino recounted the dehumanizing experience of realizing her face and her likeness had been used to produce AI-generated deepfake pornography.
Globally, women remain the primary targets of digital abuse. The United Nations has reported that the rise of online violence against women and girls is largely fueled by a backlash against women’s rights, the widespread use of AI tools, and the expansion of the “manosphere” or online spaces where misogynistic content is created, supported, and emboldened.
The internet, for many women, is no longer just a space of opportunity. It is a space of risk. It sometimes feels as though even spaces as virtual and abstract as the internet can become as scary as dark alleys in unfamiliar streets.
At times, this makes me want to urge women to log off. To just stay away from the darkness of the digital world. But perhaps that is precisely what bad actors want: for us to shrink. To hide. To silence ourselves. They want to keep us afraid.
We must not let them.
Instead, we must demand that governments, corporations, civil society, and individuals work together to ensure that technology is designed, regulated, and used in ways that are secure and safe for all.
We need stronger laws, responsible platforms, and collective accountability. We need technology designed with our rights and dignity at its heart. We need to make sure that any form of growth, progress, and innovation is not at the expense of our humanity.
And while we continue the hard work of empowering, protecting, and championing our women, I hold on to the quiet desire to live a little more analog—to slow down, to be present for myself and my loved ones, and to experience the fullness of life right in front of us.
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Sen. Risa Hontiveros is Senate deputy majority leader and chair of the committees on women, children, family relations, and gender equality; health and demography; and electoral reforms and people’s participation.
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