Unless we act, 2023 will be the year when women leave the Internet. Women have faced enormous risks online. A Pew Research report on a survey in the United States found that one-third of young women reported having been sexually harassed online, and women said they felt more uncomfortable about these experiences and consider it a bigger problem than men. One UNESCO research of journalists found that 73% of women surveyed had experienced online violence and 20% said they had experienced physical assault or abuse. offline related to online abuse. Reply, female journalist reporting censor themselves, withdraw from online interactions, and avoid interacting with their audience. Filipino-American journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa wrote about online abuse she faced, at one point receiving an average of more than 90 hate messages per hour. After she investigated writing about campaign financial irregularities surrounding then-presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, the owner of Brazilian journalist Patrícia Campos Mello received hundreds of thousands of harassing WhatsApp messages. tangled and threatened direct confrontation—so much so that her owner, the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, forced to hire bodyguards for her. She also had to cancel all events for a month. What both women share is that they dare to question authority when appearing on social networks.
It’s not just famous or well-known women who face enough online abuse to consider leaving social media. A YouGov poll conducted by dating app Bumble shows that almost half of 18-24 year olds have received unwanted sexual images in the past year. UK Member of Parliament Alex Davies-Jones has included the phrase “dick pic” in the historical record during his interview. debate on the UK’s Online Safety Bill when she asked a male congressman if he had ever received one. As she puts it, it’s not a rhetorical question for most women.
AI-assisted intimate image abuse that combines images to create or create new, often lifelike images—so-called deepfakes—are other weapons for online abuse that have disproportionate effects. worthy of women. Estimate from Sensity AI suggests that 90 to 95 percent of all deepfake videos online are non-consensual porn, and about 90 percent of them feature women. The technology for creating realistic deep works is currently far beyond our ability and efforts to combat it. What we see now is a false democratization of the potential for harm: The barriers to entry for creating deepfakes are low, and counterfeits are increasingly real. Current tools to identify and combat this abuse simply cannot keep up.
And the effects of online harm on women are terrifying. We can look at research that has been done in societies where women face more social restrictions to see the impact. In a pioneering study, Katy Pearce and Jessica Vitak found women in Azerbaijan choose not to participate online because the potential real-world consequences of online harassment are simply too high in an honor-based culture with high levels of surveillance. In other words, women face an impossible double standard: having no control over their image on social media but being severely punished for it.
There’s an answer: Better designed safety measures can help people take control of their images and messages. For example, Twitter recently allowed people to control how they are tagged in photos. Dating app Bumble has launched an app called Private Detector, an AI-powered tool that allows users to control what nudity they want to see—if any—if any. Legislation, such as the UK’s proposed Online Safety Bill, could spur social media companies to address these risks. It’s far from perfect, but the bill takes a systems-based approach to regulation, requiring platform companies to assess risks and develop upstream solutions such as improving content moderation by people, better deal with user complaints, and promote better systems that take care of users.
This regulatory approach is not guaranteed to stop large numbers of women from logging out by 2023. If they do, not only will they miss out on the benefits of being online, but their online communities We will be affected.
