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EU parliament discussing cyberviolence against women

Artificial intelligence (AI) poses new risks in terms of cyberviolence against women. Women are the primary targets of deep-fakes, particularly of ‘nudification’. More than 90 % of all deep-fake videos online are pornographic in nature and their victims are almost exclusively women – often cultural, media and political personalities, says an EU briefing for the European parliament’s annual Gender Equality Week that this year is week 50. The focus this year is Women in the digital world: safety and empowerment.

“AI also poses risks in terms of bringing abuse to completely new dimensions regarding speed, ease, quantity and broad dissemination”, the briefing says. 

“It can: automatically generate online abuse, such as harassing messages; do a much faster and deeper analysis of a person’s profile to generate hate and abusive posts and messages; find better ways to bypass content moderation, and help abusers reach a very wide audience.”

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“The use of algorithms helps to spread hate messages more quickly and to create echochambers where extremist ideas flourish. For example, algorithm-based feeding of stories and posts to young users on social platforms increases the risk of misogynist radicalisation.”

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Announcing the gender equality week, the parliament notes that female politicians, journalists and human rights defenders in the EU face higher levels of public abuse in the online world than their male counterparts. 

“Attacks and abuse against women politicians are rampant online because such acts occur anonymously, reach large audiences and aim to silence their target.”

“Women continue to be under-represented in EU countries at all levels of political decision-making as well as in political parties. The origins of this situation are complex, but one reason is the offline and online violence against women active in politics that may make women think twice before entering the political arena.”

The briefing notes that like digital technologies in general, AI is a double-edged sword for women’s rights and includes many potentially positive uses for combating gender-based violence in both offline and online settings.

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“For example, it can make possible the identification of children that appear in images or videos of child pornography. AI can also monitor online platforms to detect sexist and misogynist speech, as well as acts of cyberviolence against individual women.” 

“Hashing algorithms can help identify photos and search out known illegal content, while AI tools based on machine learning models can scan for previously unknown illegal content, but this is more problematic as they would require good-quality training data related to illegal content.” 

“Gathering such big bodies of illegal content for AI training is in itself problematic”, the briefing notes.

 

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