For all the talk of the perils and possibilities of artificial intelligence, it is ultimately a tool. 

As a tool, it’s one that can be used in a way that helps us make sense of our world today — as in the case of aiding in big data research at The Nerve — or wielded like a weapon meant to intimidate or harm others.

The latter is a topic that needs to be fleshed out. The Nerve’s Information Integrity Initiative, in partnership with UN Women, recently released a report called, “Tipping Point: The chilling escalation of violence against women in the public sphere.” This report shows that 7 in 10 women human rights defenders, activists, and journalists surveyed reported online violence against them.

This online violence led to offline harms, as 41% of those surveyed experienced attacks, abuse, or harassment that they linked with online violence.

What sorts of online violence do women face, and how does AI play a role? Let’s dive in.

Online violence against women

According to the survey, nearly a quarter (23.8%) of the women respondents said they had experienced AI-assisted online violence. Some 30% of women writers and other public communicators had experienced online violence that they indicated involved artificial intelligence technologies, compared to 28% of women human rights defenders and activists, and 19% of women journalists and media workers.

The report explains that technology-facilitated violence against women is “any act that is committed, assisted, aggravated, or amplified by the use of information communication technologies or other digital tools which results in or is likely to result in physical, sexual, psychological, social, political or economic harm, or other infringements of rights and freedoms.” 

In the online sphere, these are acts that use technology to diminish or denigrate women. It is important to note that these forms of violence either happen because the subject is a woman, or because it is disproportionately slanted towards being used against women.

These include online harassment and abuse, targeted surveillance, image- and video-based abuse, gendered hate speech, gendered disinformation, and doxxing — the act of distributing identifying information about a person, usually with malicious intent. There is also the nature of the online threat, which can be delivered through technology or, thanks to doxxing, can take virtual attacks into the offline world if your address is made public, for example.

Generative AI accelerates online violence

Generative AI, whether it’s AI used to adjust images or generate entire fake videos, has been accelerating the spread of online violence against women, by making it easier to produce deepfakes or harass women at a scale previously unrealizable.

For example, Indian independent journalist Rana Ayyub has been targeted with deepfake pornography and doxxing in a sustained and ongoing online hate campaign. UN human rights experts had to call on Indian authorities to “act urgently to protect journalist Rana Ayyub, who has received death threats” as part of the hate campaign against her. 

British journalist Carole Cadwalladr, meanwhile, had to contend with online abuse, such as having a video circulated with her head superimposed on someone being slapped by multiple men, as well a large-scale campaign to discredit her.

As an International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) big data case study mentioned in analyzing nearly 2.1 million English language tweets directed at her from December 1, 2019 to January 14, 2021, “The main goal of the abuse levelled at Cadwalladr is to discredit her professionally, thereby undermining trust in her critical reporting of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and its aftershocks, including questions about the accountability of the platforms regarding disinformation and hate speech.” 

In the cases of Brazilian journalist Talita Fernandes and Al Jazeera’s White House correspondent Kimberly Halkett, people manipulated audio and video to present an anti-presidential narrative featuring them.

For further reading

While the internet can be empowering, allowing people to speak up on topics of import and strengthening the ability of women to be at the forefront of many issues, online violence against women has real-world effects on mental health and can create a chilling effect, silencing women from action in the real world.

As UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous said in a UN report, “What begins online doesn’t stay online. Digital abuse spills into real life, spreading fear, silencing voices, and — in the worst cases — leading to physical violence and femicide.”

It is important to understand that online attacks have palpable real-world consequences for the victims. To that end, here are some recommended readings to explain the depth and breadth of the issue.

In 2022, the ICFJ released a report titled “The Chilling: A global study on online violence against women journalists.” There’s a complete 300-page version that’s available to download, alongside case studies and excerpts from the complete report.

Another recommended read is the 2023 UNESCO report, “‘Your opinion doesn’t matter, anyway’: Exposing technology-facilitated gender-based violence in an era of generative AI.” 

For further case studies, meanwhile, it would be good to look at “The women journalists of South Africa’s Daily Maverick: Sexualized, silenced, and labeled Satan” as a big data assessment of how online violence was directed at women journalists at the South African investigative journalism outlet Daily Maverick. – Rappler.com