Online Abuse of Women: Rising Violence & Authoritarianism

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; to discredit truth-tellers; and to pave the way for the consolidation of authoritarian power.

These are not the rantings of a “crazy cat lady” or a “fat, ugly whore”, although I’ve been called both. This analysis is rooted in hard – and frankly terrifying – data from new research I led, which has just been published by UN Women.

For the report – Tipping Point: The chilling escalation of online violence against women in the public sphere – my team and I surveyed hundreds of women in journalism, human rights and activism across 119 countries, documenting their experiences with online violence and the real-world harms it triggers.

What we found is a sharp, and potentially deadly, escalation in the incidence of online violence escalating to “real-world” harm. This is most acute for female journalists, where we see a dramatic acceleration in this trajectory.

When we surveyed this group in 2020one-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 swattedassaulted – 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. We found that over 19% of female journalists had experienced what they believed to be AI-assisted online violence.

The online-offline violence trajectory represents a vicious and self-perpetuating circle. Online harassment and threats beget offline attacks, and offline abuse, such as political actors targeting female journalists during public appearances, can trigger an escalation of online violence that, in turn, can exacerbate offline risks.

This cycle of violence is even more dangerous when the abuse comes from a man as powerful as the president of the US. When Donald Trump feels entitled to abuse female journalists asking difficult questions as “stupid” and tries to silence them with “quiet, piggy!” is it any wonder that misogynistic mobs feel entitled to abuse, threaten and attack them for doing their job?

Such abuses of power are part of a continuum of violence experienced by women in public life all over the world. I have studied dozens of emblematic cases of online violence against female journalists – from Mexico to India and South Africa, and from the UK and the US to the Philippines. My new boss – the Nobel laureate Maria Ressa – has been threatened with being raped “to death”. But none was more chilling than that of the assassinated Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, whose murder was linked to years of misogynistic online violence directed at her prior to her death.

Impunity for online violence aids and abets impunity for crimes against female journalists. It is time to act urgently to enforce accountability for both the perpetrators of gender-based online violence and those big tech actors who enable and amplify such attacks.

• Dr Julie Posetti is the director of the Information Integrity Initiative at TheNerve, a digital forensics lab founded by Nobel laureate Maria Ressa. She is also a professor of journalism and chair of the Centre for Journalism and Democracy at City St George’s, University of London.