Latest / Journalism 2050 / How Big Tech Unleashed a New Wave of Misogyny Against Journalists

Transcript

How Big Tech Unleashed a New Wave of Misogyny Against Journalists · Journalism 2050

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Hello and welcome back to Journalism 2050.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_02: Our listeners might have noticed an absence of new episodes, but we hope you didn't think we'd taken a break.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_02: We've actually been very busy.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_02: For us, discussing the past, present, and future of journalism is work that is never finished.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: Before we return with a whole new series of guests though, we wanted to share some of what we've been up to.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: Earlier this summer we traveled to Tbilisi, Georgia, to attend Zeg, a storytelling festival, and interviewed some incredible people fighting for journalism's future against all kinds of enemies, authoritarians, tech moguls, misogynists, you know, the usual.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_02: We speak to Lika Antadze and Nino Bakraza from Sinatlay Media about how independent news organizations joined forces in Georgia to fight back against attempts to cut off their funding and silence them.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: We host the inibitable Razia Iqbal, who spent three decades at the BBC and now teaches at Princeton University, to talk about how much journalism has changed over her career and her advice to young journalists today.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_02: We speak to Natalia Antilava and Simon Allison about building new networks for journalism in an age dominated by increasing concentrations of wealth and power.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_02: Natalia is the editor-in-chief of Coda Story and the co-founder of ZEG.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_02: And Simon is the co-founder of The Continent, Africa's most widely distributed digital newspaper.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: And finally, we interview our good friend, the formidable Julie Pazzetti, award-winning journalist and researcher on all threats confronting women journalists in the digital age.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: We hope you find these conversations as interesting as we did.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: And we look forward to resuming the series soon.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: I the singularity disappeared.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I believe has produced such a medium as Eastern.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: I'm director of the Tau Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School in New York.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_06: And I'm Heather Chaplin.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_06: I am founding director of the Journalism and Design Lab at the News School, also in New York City.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: Journalism 2050 is a podcast about the future of journalism produced in collaboration between the Tau Centre for Digital Journalism and Columbia Journalism Review, with help from the Journalism and Design Lab at the News School.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: And we're really delighted to be here live at the ZEG Festival in Tbilisi, Georgia.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's an incredible annual gathering of storytellers, and we cover many, many subjects.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: And we're even more delighted to be joined by our friend, and we actually genuinely mean that, Dr.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: Julie Pazzetti.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_02: Julie, welcome.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's so great to have you here.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks so much.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: And the title of our session is How Online Violence Pushes Women Out of Public Life.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: But one of the things we like to start with on the podcast is just, I think so many people who even who listen to us will be very familiar with your work.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_02: But for those who aren't, could you maybe just tell us a short story about your background and how you ended up doing this work before we get into the subject matter?
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_05: Sure.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_05: So I'm going to start at the very beginning, Emily Bell.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_05: It's not where I would normally start, but I think it's time to actually situate this horrific topic in lived experience.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_05: And in my case, there is actually lived experience.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_05: And so as a teenager, I grew up in a home with a violent alcoholic stepfather who turned me into a feminist warrior who was determined through whatever work I pursued to emphasize gender justice.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_05: And that mindset, very much influenced by seeing the excesses of violence and the subjugation of women, influenced my journalism.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_05: So from, you know, a young age at the ABC in Australia, where I was a broadcast journalist and ultimately a, you know, national political reporter.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_05: But even in a kind of regional office of the ABC, I was producing stories in the very early 90s that were not really heard about domestic violence and child sexual abuse and so on.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_05: And this is heavy stuff.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_05: And sitting here and to bliss you on a Sunday morning, I realize it's it's really confronting.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_05: But what I learned through that reporting, and then as a researcher, moving between journalism and academia and civil society, always emphasizing the importance of storytelling, actually, to convey the data that we'll talk about through these sorts of lived experiences.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_05: But what I realized is how intertwined misogyny and authoritarianism and injustice are.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_05: And we are now in an era where that is undeniable, where personal anecdotes completely overloaded with work currently.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_05: And I am choosing between the hours of say midnight and 1 a.m.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_05: while I'm doing the mundane admin to re-watch The Handmaid's Tale.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_05: Which is a documentary now, ten years after I first watched it, while thinking, yes, I recognise a lot of this from various points of my working and personal life.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_05: Now it is literally like watching a documentary.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_05: So that's what has driven me as a journalist, as a researcher.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_05: I began studying gender-based online violence in the context of work that Emily and I, you know, have been talking about for many years.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_05: In fact, we were new friends and uh colleagues, I think, when you just began at the Tau Centre, Emily.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_05: I remember having a chat to you about this in London at the BBC at a social media summit.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, back in 2007.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_02: 2011 maybe.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_02: No, even before that.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: I think it was 2008, 2001.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: It was a long time ago.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: It was a very long time.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: Considering how young we are, it was quite a long time ago.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_05: But at this point, I was researching the very optimistically kind of framed uh, you know, Twitterization of journalism with this idea that social media would be democratizing and would help bridge divides and would help create spaces for women and minorities to actually self-represent.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_05: So, in doing that research, at around 2011, when I'm working with journalists at the ABC, and you know, I was like Emily, I was training journalists in how to use social media.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_05: I was helping design social media strategies, I was convinced that social media kind of allowed for this authentic engagement, which could be potentially transformative and open verification and you know, all of these shifts in our identities as journalists and so on.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_05: And then in around 2011, some of the women journalists that I was interviewing about this who had started to kind of build quite an independent following in ways that we would now refer to as creator journalism.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_05: I'm using inverted commas for the podsters, they uh started talking about this trajectory from online abuse and harassment that they were experiencing, which was pretty sexualized even then as a distinguishing feature from what the men were getting, which was not much by comparison and certainly not sexualized.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_05: And it had already started to morph into offline harms, including one case, which was a case of a very prominent journalist in Australia being stalked online and then having threatening letters in her letterbox and being followed.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_05: So, this is how I came to start the kind of research that you want to talk about today.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: But I think that's such a and thank you so much for sharing that because it's not easy, even when you are a professional who's used to talking about this, to make it personal.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: But I just want to go back and actually I want to ask Heather a question now, because 2011 Heather was a games journalist.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: And this leads so this so this leads into a framing issue around that whole culture of games, and you at the same time that Julie was doing this work experienced the same phenomenon from a very different angle.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, first I want to uh echo Emily's comment.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_06: I do think telling these personal stories actually is really important because the data bears out how many women have them, and every time you're reminded that it's someone else, something just becomes a little bit freer in yourself.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_06: So thank you for opening that way.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_06: I was covering the video game industry in the early 2000s, and one of the first things I noticed was that the language that was used, the culture of the gamers, that when you scored a point, what you said was, I raped you.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_06: If you didn't say I raped you, you said I owned you.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_06: And I remember just thinking, okay.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_06: Like that's the that's how you declare the ultimate sense of victory.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_06: And it wasn't even like I slayed you, I murdered you.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_06: It's sort of the two ugliest ways that you can dominate somebody possibly.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_06: And this was before Gamergate or anything.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_06: And I I went into writing this book about video games with the question from anthropology: show me the games of your children, I'll show you the next hundred years.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_06: And I feel so often today that I saw everything back in the early 2000s about what was coming.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_06: You've already said so much that I want to dig into, especially you hit my sweet spot when you were talking about the inherent links between authoritarianism and misogyny.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_06: So put a pin in it, as they say.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_06: I think it would be really useful to ground the conversation, and we've all heard about online harassment, we've heard about the misogyny that's baked into it.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_06: Give us a lay of the land.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_06: Where are we today, July 2026?
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_06: What's happening out there?
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_06: Sure.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_05: I do want to just rewind slightly because the sort of comparative data I think is helpful to situate us in 2026.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_05: So the data that I'll share in this conversation is built around a study that I began for UNESCO with a team of international researchers in 2019.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_05: And it was designed as a study initially of the ways in which women journalists and news organizations were effectively fighting back against what I term online violence.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_05: And I use that term deliberately in the same way that advocates have campaigned to understand economic abuse, psychological abuse as forms of violence against women.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_05: So I refer to this as online violence.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_05: You'll also hear terms like technology facilitated gender-based violence, which is a big mouthful.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_05: I'd rather just cut through all the debate about terminology and refer to online violence.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_05: So this was a 2019 commission study, and between 2019 and 2022, we published a range of reports under the banner of the chilling.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_05: And the chilling was a title to reflect the chilling effect of gender-based online violence against women journalists in a multitude of ways, which I'll come to.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_05: And more recently, that work has been followed up in 2025 and now under commission to UN women.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_05: So in the first study, we surveyed around a thousand women journalists.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_05: We interviewed over 180 women journalists, editors, and other sort of responders, lawyers, and civil society workers.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_05: And we studied two emblematic cases.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_05: One of them was Maria Resser, who was not then the Nobel Peace Prize winner, and who is now my boss.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_05: Neither of these things are directly connected.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_05: And the other was Carol Cadwallader, an investigative reporter from the UK who worked with Chris Wiley, who some of you will have seen at this festival already, the whistleblower on the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_05: So these are two quite distinct cases of women who were really brutally targeted, women journalists who are really brutally targeted.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_05: And we analyzed two and a half million social media posts directed at them as part of this study.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_05: So it was a really, it was quite, you know, even UNESCO referred to it as groundbreaking.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_05: And so the survey underpinning that study was conducted at the end of 2020.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_05: We're in peak pandemic when I expected to see the data around the incidents and manifestations and experiences to be at their worst.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_05: Fast forward to the exact same time period at the end of 2025, five years later, and we've surveyed another 700 odd women in public life around the world.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_05: We have in that group an overlapping cohort of women journalists, including those from the first survey.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_05: And I'm here to tell you that unfortunately the situation has not improved.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_02: I'm shocked to hear that given the prevailing climate.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_05: So just to give you some kind of top-line comparative figures.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_05: So with women journalists, and that's the only group we can compare here, although with the women in public life, we now are looking at women political actors, women human rights defenders, civil society leaders, and those people, you know, who we might call creators who are inclusive of other, you know, writers and other public intellectuals and others.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_05: And so in 2020, we had a statistic that was 73% of the women journalists we surveyed had experienced online violence, harassment, abuse, attacks, including forms of digital violence like doxing and other digital security threats.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_05: That figure hasn't changed too much.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_05: So in 2025, it's now standing at 75%.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_05: So the incidence rate seems to be pretty consistent.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_05: What has shifted dramatically is what I think is the most dangerous trajectory and dangerous uh signal about this phenomenon, which is that in 2020, 20%, so a fifth of the women journalists we surveyed had experienced offline harm.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_05: So they described this as attacks, abuse, and harassment in the physical realm that they believed had been triggered online.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_05: And they gave us many examples.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_05: In 2025, that figure had more than doubled to 42% of the women journalists surveyed.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_05: And to give you another data point, which I think is needing to be unpacked, we've also seen the number of women journalists reporting online violence incidents to the police more than doubling between 2020 and 2025, which could be attributed to a range of factors like increasing incidents, increasing awareness, but also the failure, and I know we're going to come to this, of the big tech platforms to effectively deal with this problem and to in any way provide redress.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: So again, I was uh this is speaking to my very specific interests around how these platforms have played into a poor environment for all kinds of democratic processes, including the participation of 51% of the population in any kind of public discourse or public life or whatever.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: One of the bits of context around this is we've seen a dramatic decline in the number of trust and safety staff working at the platforms, and we've seen a deprioritization, essentially led by the United States government, of tech platform moderation and pushing the platforms themselves to get rid of this stuff.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_02: How much do you does your work actually look at the platform side of it and talk to people in policy within those companies?
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I mean it was a significant feature of the work we did for the chilling, and it's it's absolutely interconnected.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_05: So I refer to the platforms and not just social media platforms.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_05: Now we have to think about generative AI's role in this.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_05: The phenomenon of nudification tools, you know, the ability to very quickly, cheaply and easily create deepfakes that are indistinguishable from a real porn film or a real snuff film.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_06: I hadn't realized, I just learned yesterday that I didn't realize that the term deepfake originally meant specifically taking a woman's face on a on a nude body.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_06: I didn't realize that was the origin, yeah.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_05: So these companies I refer to as vectors and facilitators.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_05: And I do believe that there is culpability there.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_05: What's worse, to your point, Emily, is that this has been acknowledged.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_05: So in our work with the Chilling, we interacted with companies.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_05: We, under Commission to UNESCO, had direct interactions with Facebook, and I wrote about this in a chapter of The Chilling, in a particularly horrific case involving a journalist in Northern Ireland, a woman called Patricia Devlin, who was a crime reporter, who received during the pandemic a very credible threat such that the police came to her door to warn her of death threats that had been surfaced in the context of online violence directed at her and against her then infant, to rape her infant, with details of the address where that infant was being cared for by her grandmother.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_05: So this is, you know, so so what I'm saying here is there is no doubt that they are aware of the function of their technologies in creating serious risk of violence as sexual violence, not just, I don't mean just in the sense that this is lesser, but including this trajectory to physical and sexual violence.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_06: But why do you think that what's the increase from digital threats to online threats?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_06: Is it people feeling empowered because it's been unchecked for all those years?
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_06: Or why is that on the rise?
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I mean it's difficult to say without doing follow-up research on that.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_05: And we would need to, I mean, what we what we want to ultimately do is to do parallel research on perpetrator behaviors.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_05: So, but yes, sorry, I'm speaking like an academic.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_05: Um be free, just say what you think.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_05: I absolutely think it's the licensing of misogyny, the licensing of organized, networked misogyny, and the licensing of the physical manifestations of those kinds of acts.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_05: So when you degrade, when you pile on, there's a term that that is used against uh women journalists in the US to organize abusers against them, dog piling, which is as disgusting as it sounds as a term.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_05: And so when you are not just observing this as though it is some kind of dark web activity, but you're seeing it mandated from the trillionaire tech bro in charge of X, and frankly, where you're seeing these attitudes reinforced by the White House and other people who are.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_05: When you call a woman journalist Piggy to her face, when there are court proceedings that indicate that you have, in fact, you know, required to pay compensation because of a presumed rape, then yes, you are creating an environment that no longer hides the function of misogyny in authoritarian contexts.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_05: And the companies are facilitating this because they have not just obliterated in some cases trust and safety teams.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, at Meta, I'm sure you remember this, Emily, but they they were one of the first acts was to kind of remove gender-based harms from their taxonomy of harms.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_05: And so there is actually, and I know this from research that they have been discouraged from acting specifically on something that could be perceived to be a gender-based harm.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_02: I don't you may know this, but one of the questions that raised always raised in my mind was to what extent that is tied to this idea that political speech, particularly in the United States, is now often based on gender violence, like on violence.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's a very violent rhetoric, and often women are involved.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, one of the reasons for a lot of these changes happening in the States is to enable the administration to post and say whatever they like, because previously some of those images.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, they've been deplatformed.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, have been de-platformed.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is a this this feels like we're talking about something that happened in a weird dystopian sci-fi film, but it's that we're living in.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_02: That we are living in.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_05: Don't you sometimes feel like you're in the montage sequence at the beginning of a dystopian film where they're like people still kind of mock me when I use the term broligarchy, you know, which dates back to sort of 2011 as a internet slang to describe this convergence of oligarchical power and bro culture.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_05: The broligarchy is in charge.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, they're you know the listed broligarchy.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_02: So I only have one, I only have one objection to the word broligarchy, which I think completely describes what we're in, which is I just think is too friendly.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's I think it's too humanizing.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I think what you're talking about is this extraordinary alignment of power, which resides if you one's not allowed to say this particularly as a green card holder in the United States.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: But if you looked, for instance, at 1930s Germany and said what were the ingredients of fascism, what people forget is yes, everything that we know about all of the targeting of minorities, but it was critically about the alignment of power and industry.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: And misogyny was an absolute feature.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, see, we were we were really gonna try to not get to that till later.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_06: But the cats out of the box.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_06: Can I go?
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_06: Can I go?
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_06: Because it's my one of my favourite topics.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_06: Sorry, sorry.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_06: I've I'm just I was told not to mention the Nazis until 35 minutes in.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I don't, I don't Can I go?
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_02: Can I go?
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know how many people here are aware of the phenomenon of Godwin's law, which in early that you're so young, the audience.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: In early in the early internet culture, there's the thing called Godwin's Law, which is if you started a talk board or an online thread, a mankled Godwin, um within twenty-five comments, somebody will mention the Nazis.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, but Heather Heather is a human manifestation of the case.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_06: But I would like to say I would like to say I I predate that.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_06: I've been talking about the Nazis since before people were online.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_06: I was raised by Holocaust survivors.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_06: The Nazis are always lurking around.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_06: But but also, like, okay, that it has always been so interesting to me that part of any authoritarian attempt involves this very ugly strain of misogyny.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_06: What is that about?
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, if you can pit 50% of the population against the other half, it's just a strategy.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_05: I think it's strategic.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_05: I do think it's strategic.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_05: But also it's part of the brutality.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_05: It's the biggest group you can collectively dehumanize, and to do so effectively with and through tools, which, you know, in the 1930s Germany were physical and you know there were propaganda media, of course, but uh there was no internet.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_05: The difference between then and now is that we are in a networked misogynistic environment, unlike, and it's globally interconnected.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_05: And so the export of the political design of misogyny is a global rollback of rights happening before our eyes.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_05: This is one of the things that that we've we've written in the work for UN Women, which is being published under unlike the chilling for the UN report, it's called the tipping point, because we really do feel like this is a moment where we're seeing this kind of tipping into a situation where the subjugation of women is so sustained and the rollback of rights, which is being facilitated in part through gender-based online violence, in significant part, has been so effective that it's going to be extremely difficult to come back from that.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_05: But let me just talk for a moment actually about the silencing, because this is this is a big feature of the power of authoritarian misogynistic strategy.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_05: So it's about shutting us up and shutting down our efforts for accountability work.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_05: If you are a journalist, if you're a female academic, if you are a civil society leader, if you are an influencer who's focused on activist issues that are connected to progressive values, then you pose a threat to the mission, which is to destabilize democracy and deliver authoritarian or dictatorial rule in the cases that we're seeing now, often affiliated with oligarchical ambition.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_05: So the objective is to silence on the one hand, and this is why I refer to women journalists actually as the sort of the proxies for the experiences of women in public life more broadly, because women journalists' work is accountability work.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_05: It is about speaking truth, not just to power, but to male power.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_05: So first they came for the women journalists.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_05: And so it's about silencing to undercut their credibility as well, though.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_05: So to dehumanize and to discredit so that their audiences turn away from them at the same time as they're being silenced.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: I just wanted to cut in here with my version of the Nazis, which is this platform because platforms, well, not just platforms, but also working as I do now in higher education in the United States, a place called Columbia University.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_02: You may have read about it in the news over the past couple of years.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: There's recently been discussion in the United States about the complete erasure of what they call DEI, which is initiatives for diversity, diversity, equity, inclusion.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I heard, I wish I could remember who it was, a female, I think, academic saying, what we're experiencing in everything at the moment, and it starts with gender, but it moves across business, etc., is a backlash against accountability.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_02: And if you start to think about it as a backlash against accountability, it suddenly makes sense.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's like we're not going to have any regulations around businesses like platforms.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_02: We're not going to have any DEI in universities because the people, whether people of colour, whether they're women who have been calling out power, they have caused us a problem.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_02: They're costing us money, they're stopping us to do what we want.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_02: What we want, yeah.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so and so actually, all of this is about, oh, you know, anti-woke.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's not anti-woke, it's anti-accountability.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_05: I think that's a really good frame.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_05: And it just so happens that women do a lot of that work.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, right.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_05: But if you can eliminate a great chunk of the people doing that work by subjecting them to sexual violence, whether it's through digital facilitation or in the physical realm or physical attacks.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_05: And we see this is a global phenomenon.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_05: This is, you know, we're talking a lot about, I guess, the US, but you know, in Western liberal democracies where the experiences of women, journalists and women in public life more broadly, actually shared by women around the world.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_05: And there are distinctions and we can address those.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_05: But it's the one issue in my work on safety of journalists and media freedom, it's the one issue where I barely see distinctions in experience by comparison.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_05: So we can talk about the fact that, you know, the rates of murder with impunity for crimes against journalists are so much higher in country X, Y, and Z than they are in other countries.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_05: But the incidence of gender-based online violence against women journalists is consistent globally.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_05: What's distinct is that you see manifestations of online violence against women in, say, you know, the Middle East and North Africa and in South Asia and other cultures where there tends to be more patriarchal kind of establishment.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, now we're seeing this as a globalized phenomenon, but traditionally these values held.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_05: And so there, when you call a woman a prostitute, which is a common abusive term and hashtag used against women journalists to obviously conflate their role as journalists and their natural state of being as prostitutes, according to the attackers, is that a woman in a certain cultural context where sex work is not just forbidden, but can see you physically harmed and possibly murdered, then those sorts of impacts are quite distinct.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_05: But the women in the UK are still being called prostitutes.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_06: Well, I have to say, you just uh Emily's sick of listening to me talk about back in the day when I covered video games, but you've just given me another thing that it turns out was was prescient, which is when I was at the Xbox launch party in like 2004, and I was hanging out with very successful game designers who everybody here would know their games, they were introducing me around as a prostitute working the party.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_06: And I was like, you know, I'm a reporter, right?
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_06: Who am gonna write about this party?
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_06: It didn't even occur to them to only have the thought and not verbalize it.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_06: No, and now they thought it was funny.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_05: And now they're verbalizing it at scale.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_02: But but but again, and we sort of slightly skipped over this part, but going back to Gamergate, which was the big first big online, I I can't even describe it as a scandal.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was a scandal, but it was the first big online phenomenon of the coming together of those two worlds, which is misogyny in the games world.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_05: And targeting a journalist.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_02: And targeting journalists, yes.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_06: And you were right, I mean, you were in the middle of the I'm so OG that I was already out by Gamergate.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_06: I when that happened, I was just like, tell me something I don't know.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, it really um felt like it was it was seeing a glimpse of what the future was going to be, and it was this.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_06: Emily's also tired of me talking about this.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_06: I'm never tired of it.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's always like she's tired of me.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_02: She doesn't like me talking about Nazis, she doesn't like me talking about games, designs, doesn't it?
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_02: This is not true.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_02: I'm she's trying to she's trying to silence me.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_02: You know what it is?
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_06: Is it's something that I've struggled to articulate for 20 years, but it was a personality that was very hyper-masculine, but not in like a big buff way.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_06: It was a type of personality who was very intelligent in some ways and completely terrified of human emotion or human empathy.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_06: And if you want to go archetypal about it, it's it's the fear of the feminine.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_06: And then what happens when you're afraid of the feminine is you have to demonize it and you have to crush it to not to put too fine a point on things.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_06: And I feel like if video game culture was sort of a little tell about because these 20 years ago when I was writing this, Elon Musk was a young man playing.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_06: He was a young man playing.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_06: Basically, the way I summarized the personality that I felt like I was seeing then is Elon Musk.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, and in fact, if you read the book Muskism, which I would really urge to do Muskism.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_02: Muskism is about I don't know whether it's out yet in Europe, but it's written by two American writers, Ben Tarnoff and Quin Slobodine.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_02: And if you want to listen to them talking about it, they have appeared on our podcast.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and that but there's a great origin story in that book about Elon Musk as a gamer and how some of his ideas and thoughts that we now see dominating actually the political and commercial world or really came from exactly this period.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_05: I think I think we need to also fast forward to the Tate Empire.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, we've gone from gamergate, which is, as you described, all about you know male dominance, uh, but now we have a business model attached to that through Andrew Tate and his brother and his bros, which, you know, I agree is a far too friendly term to describe these misogynistic pricks.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_05: But uh prefer that, yes.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_05: No.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_05: It's combining bodybuilding and kind of grooming and rape culture and far-right politics in a way which is actually, you know, I mean, the manosphere is a related area of practice and research, which is supercharging alongside generative AI, the threats and the risks that we are talking about here.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_06: So I have an AI question.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_06: How's that for a change of place?
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_02: That's great.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_02: Do you know what I was I was about to say?
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_02: We are now almost the same person.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_02: We need to move.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_02: Can you imagine if that was true, how terrifying that person would be, and also how terrified society should be if that actually came true?
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_06: What happens?
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_06: To me, this seems like an interesting question, but you guys might because you spend less time thinking about Nazis and more time thinking about platforms and AI?
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: Can I say there's no distinction, a decreasing distinction between Nazis and platforms and AI?
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_02: They are pretty much the same.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_06: What happens when the machines are learning from this world where women have been treated this way and the mat becomes the reality, and then the new model learns from the old model?
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_06: What's gonna happen then?
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_05: Increasingly misogynistic and sexually violent abuse and harassment and physical risks that are associated with that.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, the one story I can't quite get past, which ties all this together, is one involving a British Labour MP called Jess Asato, who at the beginning of this year was campaigning for a ban in the UK on nudification apps, and was campaigning for legislation to try to prevent the deployment of these tools, or frankly, the design of these tools to enable this kind of abuse and harassment.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_05: And nudification tools for the uninitiated involve stripping naked a woman from her photo in a way that makes it appear completely seamless and believable that this is in fact her body.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_05: You can pose the woman, you can animate the woman.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_05: And in Jess Asato's case, while she's campaigning against this, the abusers got together and not only did iterative nudification work with her, they created a deep fake video using these tools in which she is seen being chloroformed and prepared for rape.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_05: And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_05: So this is the punishment for a woman to be.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_02: So one of the things you should say is these are freely available, and they're available on Google Play Store, the Apple store.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we all know people who work for Google and Apple, and they don't seem like terrible people, and many of the people I know who work there are actually women as well.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_02: What expressions have we seen from these companies, not that's been imposed on them by law, but from their own employees, to say, if we're going into this future, we don't want to be a part of it?
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_02: Just to play devil's advocate, you would think, with 51% of the buying public being women and 51%, presumably, of their workforce being women, that there would be a market and cultural shift against this, that they would have to act on themselves.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, but they are women who are comparatively disempowered in companies run by billionaires and trillionaires who are all men, uh the ones in charge.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_05: And on top of that, the ones left in senior management positions tend to be in the you know, the kind of dwindling trust and safety sector.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_05: So the tech bros tend to send the tech sisters to kind of have the compensation.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_05: I think we've changed that term to misogynist prick prick.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_05: We have misogynist pricks, sorry, not the tech bros.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_05: Um so what do I hear?
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_05: Do you know?
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, the argument that is most frequently put to me is that the problem is not the technology, the problem is men.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_05: So the outsourcing of responsibility for the problems created by their technologies to both the targets, that would be the survivors of the abuse, and the perpetrators.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, fair point, of course, male violence is an underpinning problem here, but it abrogates their responsibility in their own minds.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_05: And the other thing I hear is look, we just can't deal with gender as a form of harm in this environment.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_06: You know what I find so interesting too is if it was purely just capitalist motivation, then for 51% of the population, you would want to be including them, which tells us Well, I I mean I think it what it tells us is that they've really they're really confident about the subjugation of women and about the project to to silence.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_06: And that it is a project.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_06: Yes.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_06: Even if it's subconscious in people's in the men's minds, it is a project, and it is a project that does that almost unbelievable thing of overriding the profit motive.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_05: Yes, but also remember that we know from research conducted by multiple academics across institutions that abuse is profitable, that hate is profitable, that disinformation is profitable, because it is associated with the engagement model that drives views that is associated with their business model.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_05: This is why they don't act until compelled.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_05: This is why kind of the the most hope I have uh for any kind of change is not actually through well-designed legislation and regulation that is actually backed by the political will to implement it, because that is so hard to achieve given the lobbying power of these companies.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_05: It's class action and product liability cases that we're starting to see emerge in the US and elsewhere, which causes them to actually have to pay at a rate that is higher than what they anticipate they will profit from by continuing to support this model.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_02: I want to do two things here, one of which is I want to silence women on the stage and bring in both men and women in the audience.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_02: So to handle And please do speak into the mic because we're recording.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_04: I'm Deborah Wilde and I'm German.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_04: And because you asked about the correlation, what's the game?
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_04: Um you should maybe take a look at Germany because, and I'm giving you another example, about four weeks ago on national TV, the head of the statistics department of the police introduced the rising statistic of violence against women, and the anchor person was female.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_04: And after he introduced her, she said, So the statistics is going up.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_04: What's your advice to women?
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_04: And the man said, statistically speaking, it's unadvisable for women to enter a relationship with men.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_04: They had to turn off their social media because the threats of both of them were so high that they had to step away.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_04: But if you ask what the correlation is, is in Germany as elsewhere, women are for the first time better educated, more driven than male.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_04: If you look at it, who wins the right-wing parties, the biggest margin of pluses is men 18 to 25.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_04: The women of the same margin vote left.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_04: So, and to go back, I mean, in the US, we are talking already about voting per household, so taking women's rights away.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_04: And if you read the book about the 25th Amendment, women at the time when they were pushing to have women vote couldn't rent rooms because they weren't allowed to talk publicly.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_04: So the aim is we, when we are educated, vote for our interests, and that's not right.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_04: That's not the right wing, the mega, and it's power.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_04: We get rid of them by by making sure they don't have access.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's such a that's such a thank you for saying that.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a great point.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_02: And also I self-disclosing here about my personal interest in this.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_02: I'm married to a man and I have three sons who are all in their twenties now.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_02: But I do feel as though this is not a problem that we can solve actually as women.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_02: This has to be a problem where you have the whole of society, and that means men as well, being involved in pushing against some of these cultural norms that are being established that they don't feel part of.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_02: I think there are many men who don't.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_02: Well, obviously, there are many men who don't.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_04: But I have a question for Emily because I was wondering in Germany or Europe, it's actually the case.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_04: There are cases of um, I think it affects Great Britain as well, platforms where men get together to exchange tips and how to rape their partners.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_04: And listening to the gaming bro, I'm wondering if there's a correlation of the gamers of the 80s who now might be married and have families exchanging tips.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_02: I actually think, I'm sorry to speak as an academic now, not a journalist.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_02: That is a great research question.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_02: And again, it just opens this idea of we need to follow this.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_05: The gamification of rape.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, is that what we're dealing with?
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_05: So, sorry, so you might look in Germany because there's another big case I can tell you later about uh yeah.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_05: And this is happening, of course, in France, and there's cases in the UK.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, it's all part of the same phenomenon.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_05: What's fascinating is that it's surfacing and it's being legitimized in a way.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_05: Not necessarily, I mean, there is there is a reckoning, you know, for those men underway through the courts, but it's associated with the surfacing of so much malevolence that was previously an undercurrent.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_03: Uh hi, I'm Laura, and I guess I'm gonna out myself as maybe very young and online here, but there's sort of this intense cynicism in nihilism online where people say horribly misogynistic things without even seeming to think about it, or they'll incorporate like incel culture lingo in how they speak.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_03: And sometimes you're like, oh ha ha, how funny, but then you're like, oh, this is really dark.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_03: And I guess if you guys have thought about how do we address sort of this, like, it's not so serious, it's just a joke with like these really dark roots.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_03: What are you getting so upset about?
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_03: It's just a joke.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, it was so so I'm so old that I remember and was a media reporter during the first wave of what we what we'll called lads mags.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_02: And there were a series of magazines that hawked back and they were called things like nuts and loaded.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_02: And it was like, we're not we're like new men, we're not sexist, but we do like to see women with not many clothes on, and we do like to joke.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's irony, and of course, if you're British, the British can't take anything seriously.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_02: Americans like being a Brit operating in America and trying to explain irony on a daily basis is is hard, but it speaks to this, it speaks to again this blurring of a line between it's a joke, it's not really a joke.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's the president of the United States says quiet piggy to a uh female journalist.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I saw a great reel on Instagram, sorry for using Instagram, of a female comedian saying quiet piggy.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_02: I wouldn't even say that to a pig, even if it was being really noisy.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's like just such a kind of a and and I think that you're so right that humour.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's a form of science.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_02: It's a way of saying shut up.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_06: It's an it's a way of absolutely slicing.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_06: Every time someone says that to you online, translate it as if it's from another language that they're saying shut the fuck up.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_05: And I do think, I mean, our research also is looking at bystander culture.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_05: That's the other thing the platform said.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_05: We just need to educate the bystanders to intervene, as though the technology, again, is not actually designed to inflict this harm.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_05: But I would advocate for bystander protection and advocacy in the same way that we would not walk past, or I would not walk past a man beating a woman on the street without doing something within my computer.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_05: Capacity and safety to actually respond to that.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_02: Also, you don't need us to tell you this because this is your world.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_02: So this is your world.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I think our hope resides in people like you.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_02: So we had to grow up in an unbelievable world where the things that women just took as a joke for years and years and years.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_02: When I look back on them now, my colleague Margaret Sullivan, who's a famous media writer in the United States, she's like when you recount what you had to put up with in a newsroom now, you actually think, Oh my God, what were we thinking?
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_05: But Emily, this is now what women journalists live through online.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_05: And it's like it reminds it reminds me that yes, I grew up in the newsroom where my first boss was sacked for sexually harassing me.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody did, nobody was nobody sacked in my newsroom for sexually harassing anybody, and that was a big problem.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_05: What is terrifying for me is that then I watched over the past, you know, the past 30 years, we made so many advances, particularly in our cultural and geographic context, for w for women's justice within newsrooms and fair recognition and front page status.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_05: But now the context within which this abuse, this harassment, and this subjugation is happening is that it's rapidly rolling that back again.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_05: So, you know, to to sort of say, oh, she just needs a good raping lol, you know, is really replicating.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_02: So we kind of technically over time, but I just want to I want to use um not being silenced as a woman to um one more audience question.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_02: And then also just to do a little bit of a what should we do about it?
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um I just have a couple of comments.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um recently there was a really interesting BBC piece um called the The Manosphere Messiahs.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_02: This is the Luis Rue.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, okay.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_00: In the last week or two, about this Tate model being manifested in in Africa.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was in Kenya and um and another where in South America.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was actually Mexico.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_00: But it's popping up that same model and it's accelerating the normalization and the globalization of it, and it's monetizing it.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I think that's I think that's exactly point.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm always thinking about all these, a lot of people are about the state of really everything now, because it is all all tied together.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: What people can do.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I think about divestment.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: There need to be things that people tools to take some kind of action.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's just like with the Musk uh phenomenon.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's like um I have investments that are in tied to the index funds.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_00: So passively, just because my money is invested in index funds, I'm basically funding Musk.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: We're all in enabling all this.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_02: So that's actually a great way to get from because we now do have to wrap up, to great, and I think that's a brilliant point, which is what can and should be done.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_06: We I in every let in every I no longer subscribe to Amazon.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_06: We don't use their services, we don't use but yes, and and thank you so much because we do want to end this on what do we do?
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_06: Positivity today.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_06: What is everyone in the no, it's not even positivity, it's it's channeling our anger.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_06: Because the reason these people are in power is because they're organized.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_06: So what do we do?
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_06: What does every person in this room do today when they leave?
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, I've been saying this and writing this for a decade, but we need to get as organized and as networked and as creative as they are to push back against the rollback.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_05: This is about rights rollback and the facilitation of authoritarianism, which is what we've been discussing, in effect.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_05: You know, this does involve really effective legislative and regulatory interventions, particularly in the EU and the UK, where we can still do work in this space.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_05: It probably involves leaning into the progress in that regard being made with regard to child sexual abuse online, because that is where there is a bipartisan willingness to introduce legislation which has to be effective.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_05: It cannot be just about taking it down.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_05: It has to be about not fucking putting it up and not actually creating the technologies which by design ensure the ability to abuse women and minorities and to subjugate them and to roll back the rights that are associated with them.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_05: So it is about human rights by design and safety by design requirements of these companies, and that has to come through the kind of legislative and regulatory work being done.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_05: But it also has to be about shifting the narrative.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_05: We have to tell, we're at a storytelling festival, we have to tell the powerful stories of lived experience backed up by the data, because women's testimony, as we know from history, is unfortunately not enough to convince policymakers and judges who are presiding over cases which might include class actions for women targeted in public life, for example.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_05: And we need to ensure that the data that backs that up is robust and rigorous.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_05: And so that's why my team and I at The NERV, which is an organization that Maria Ressa runs, and I runs something called the Information Integrity Initiative, which is designed to try and blend this kind of you know lived experience-based research, qualitative research, with a big data analysis that shows without a doubt how these patterns are manifesting, and with the kind of statistics that I've shared with you today that have to shift public policy on a global level.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_06: I I know we're out of time, but I just want to I'm gonna just say, what can each person in this room do today or tomorrow?
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_05: Be a bystander who feels the opportunity to speak up and to reflect back in whatever tone and way you think is appropriate in your culture online, to simply remind people that there is a woman sitting next to you or online in the next chat who is hearing and seeing that and for whom the mainstreaming of that kind of attack could actually be so dehumanizing as to drive them out of these spaces, but also to expose them to significant risks.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_02: I'm also gonna say get offline.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_02: I say this is somebody who spends way too much time online, but actually getting at getting into real spaces with real people and speaking to each other and raising these questions and realizing that there are so many people with experiences and thoughts and stories and ideas who do not want to be part of the AI future or whatever.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, being online is great, but there are alternatives to, I think, building coalition.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_05: To build the kind of, you know, the networks of resistance, these physical spaces are really important, and so they are for advocacy and for sharing these stories in a way that helps build mutual support.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_05: But I don't want to create the impression that getting offline is a solution.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_05: We see this a lot in our research that editors are telling journalists just get offline, lawyers are telling them, psychologists are telling them just get offline.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_05: You cannot be effective in public life.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_05: We will not have deliberative democracy without online participation.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_02: We have to next year.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_02: Because I used to believe that, and now I'm like, I don't know that I believe that anymore.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, that's next to the gun and we get reduced.