U.S. technology companies are being held responsible in a succession of legal cases for allegedly breaching their duty of care in how they design digital platforms that result in addiction and other social harms to children. But corporate responsibility should not stop at fixing addictive algorithms. Sometimes technology can be both essential and potentially harmful because of conditions in a certain context. In Afghanistan, technology is the last refuge for girls who want — and deserve — an education past the age of 12 in a country where doing so is a crime. In that context, it is imperative that tech companies protect this vital connection to the outside world while doing so in a way that shields them from resulting abuse by the Taliban regime.
About 3.8 million girls ages 7 to 18 are out of school in Afghanistan. More than 2 million of them are teenagers barred by law from secondary education. A December 2021 decree, Letter Number 707, issued by the Ministry of Education just months after the Taliban’s return to power in August of that year, banned girls from education beyond primary school, beginning in 7th grade. Letter Number 2271 later extended the ban to universities, making Afghanistan the only country in the world to legally exclude girls and women from continued learning.
In response, tens of thousands of Afghan girls have turned to digital platforms, most notably those run by Meta and Google, to continue their education online. Human rights activists have collaborated with Afghan women and men to build online schools despite the Taliban’s restrictions, which now are also extending to the western — and traditionally freer — province of Herat. These include Begum Academy’s blend of radio, television, and social media, SOLAx’s WhatsApp-based academy operating from Rwanda, and the Herat Online School, which offers a curriculum including prohibited subjects such as philosophy and music. For some of the most isolated girls on the planet, a smartphone and a basic connection can be the only opportunity for contact with the outside world.
But the same platforms used to educate girls can expose them to harm. The Taliban’s digital surveillance is expanding, and reports suggest a new surveillance app backed by Iran could soon give the regime’s intelligence services access to Afghan users’ devices. The 2024 Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Law has already extended morality policing online, with sweeping consequences. Under Articles 13 and 17, a photo saved without a full-face veil, or recordings of a woman’s voice, count as a violation. If a girl’s phone is searched at a checkpoint and contains such material or downloaded texts authored by women or promoting “Western values,” it can be used as evidence against her, leading to detention, flogging, torture, forced marriage, or disappearance.
New Criminal Procedure Code
In January 2026, the Taliban closed off the last space where girls could learn unseen. The new Criminal Procedure Code for Courts now permits male relatives and community members to surveil and control women and girls. A father, brother, neighbor, or stranger has been given the right to punish girls and women they accuse of criminal activity, such as secretly accessing education online. Even the home, once the one place a girl could turn on her phone without fear of a checkpoint, is no longer safe. There is now nowhere, online or offline, where an Afghan girl can learn without risk of being found.
Predictably, this climate of fear and mistrust has produced a severe mental health crisis. Over 80 percent of Afghan girls and women suffer from symptoms of depression, and 81 percent report mild to extremely severe anxiety under Taliban restrictions. Hospitals saw a dramatic surge in emergency admissions for girls and young women following the education ban, including cases of self-inflicted harm. In one hospital in Herat Province, women and girls accounted for as many as 90 percent of mental health admissions. Afghanistan is one of the few countries in the world where the trend runs opposite the global pattern of a decreasing suicide rate: Approximately 80 percent of recorded suicides in Afghanistan involve adolescent girls and young women, most of them under the age of 20. This is the human cost of state-sanctioned misogyny. As the violence intensifies, the case for tech companies to act becomes more urgent.
The platforms operating in this environment have not been indifferent. To their credit, both Google and Meta have removed Taliban accounts and propaganda, in compliance with U.S. counterterrorism sanctions, though other, pro-Taliban accounts appear to have been created to replace them. Further, Meta’s Oversight Board warned in March 2026 that its Community Notes rollout, a core design decision, could facilitate serious harm in countries governed by “repressive human rights regimes.” The Oversight Board recommended that such countries be excluded from the rollout until robust privacy protections are in place.
If one feature can carry that degree of risk, the platform built around it can too. When technology is a girl’s last lifeline before complete erasure, that risk demands more than dropping a single feature. Tech companies, Meta and Google in particular, owe these girls an ethical duty of care related to their entire platform, since their platforms control the technology and infrastructure behind nearly every online school operating in Afghanistan today. This responsibility is made all the more urgent because standard tech safety designs fail to protect human rights in repressive environments.
Crucial Commitments
Three commitments by the companies that own and control the technology used for online education would make a real difference.
First, to protect girls who are subject to arbitrary detentions and device searches at checkpoints, Meta and Google should build automatic, interval-based deletion into their systems, which could be turned on by default for accounts in high-risk regions like Afghanistan, with a one-tap opt-out. This continuous deletion is necessary for contextually sensitive content, such as photos, voice messages, and location data, since apps cannot detect when a checkpoint search is occurring. Even if educated about digital safety, a girl cannot be expected to remember to act under the debilitating fear of a Taliban interrogation. The infrastructure already exists. For example, Google’s Location History auto-deletes data on a set schedule, currently defaulting to three months, but only for users who have opted in. In the context of Afghanistan, the default would be reversed. Users who want to save their photos and other content could disable the feature. Tying the default to a region as a whole rather than individual users keeps it from singling out women or excluding men, who also face checkpoint risks. Moreover, when this setting is normalized in high-risk zones, a clean phone will not raise red flags. It is also for this reason that this setting should be integrated into apps, such as WhatsApp, rather than exist independently as a distinct safety tool. A standalone app could endanger the user if detected.
Second, as state surveillance tools targeting Afghan users advance, both companies should commit to regularly publishing and updating a gender-specific human rights risk assessment for Afghanistan, and sharing with civil society and women’s rights defenders what they know about how the state’s surveillance disproportionately targets women and girls, which features expose them most, and what contingency plans exist for Taliban-imposed internet shutdowns. Both companies emphasize their commitment to corporate responsibility, with Meta publishing annual human rights reports and Google maintaining a continuously updated Transparency Report hub, which appears to have been abandoned in recent years. Meta’s decision to dismantle its independent fact-checking program raises serious questions about the platform’s commitment to users’ safety. If these reports are to be treated as binding human rights commitments, the platforms must extend their focus to the life-or-death effects of their technologies on Afghan women and girls.
Third, Meta should convene a formal Afghanistan working group that includes Afghan women educators from Begum Academy, SOLAx, and Herat Online School, alongside women’s rights defenders and digital safety experts. The group could advise on implementation in Afghanistan of the Oversight Board’s March 2026 recommendations on its community notes rollout – for example in relation to the recommendations for “ongoing data gathering, assessment and reporting regarding the functionality of community notes.” The working group also could help Meta ensure other safety decisions are informed by the experiences of those most affected.
Compliance with the new legal standards being developed by the U.S. lawsuits in relation to addiction and platform design is the bare minimum for companies that have transformed the world and are positioned to do far more. Rather than wait for U.S. or European courts or regulators to force them, these platforms can choose to adopt a broader duty of care, and it should include consideration for every girl in Afghanistan or similar contexts whose only defense against complete erasure is a smartphone with the right settings turned on.
