"Networked misogyny is now firmly established as a key tactic in the 21st-century authoritarian's playbook. This is not a new trend but it is now being supercharged by generative AI tools that make it easier, quicker and cheaper than ever to perpetrate online violence against women in public life from journalists to human rights defenders, politicians and activists. The objectives are clear: to help justify the rollback of gender equality and women's reproductive rights; to chill women's freedom of expression and their participation in democratic deliberation;"
"When we surveyed this group in 2020, one-fifth of them reported offline attacks, abuse and harassment connected to the online violence they had experienced. But when we repeated the survey five years later, that alarming statistic had more than doubled to 42%. These women have been swatted, assaulted and even abused in the company of their children. These threats are heightened by the mainstreaming of generative-AI tools that allow for the near-instant misrepresentation and discrediting of female journalists through the deployment of deepfakes and worse."
A global survey of hundreds of women in journalism, human rights, and activism across 119 countries documented experiences with online violence and the resulting real‑world harms. Networked misogyny is being amplified by generative AI tools that make large-scale misrepresentation, deepfakes, and discrediting campaigns easier, faster, and cheaper. Objectives of these campaigns include justifying rollbacks of gender equality and reproductive rights, chilling women’s freedom of expression and democratic participation, and discrediting truth‑tellers to consolidate authoritarian power. Incidents escalated into offline attacks more frequently, especially for female journalists: offline attacks linked to online abuse rose from about 20% in 2020 to 42% five years later.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]