Social media, politics, and gendered disinformation

Kristina Wilfore and Lucina Di Meco Transcript

Sabrina Merage Naim
From Evoke Media I'm Sabrina Mirage Naim, with me is Kassia Binkowski, and this is Breaking Glass - a series of conversations with women around the world who are shattering glass ceilings and challenging social norms. They are audacious, gutsy, and their stories are echoed across borders and generations in a rallying cry that is changing the narrative for women everywhere. Today's conversation is with Kristina Wilfore and Lucina Di Meco. Kristina is a global democracy activist and works with political leaders and NGOs around the world to help improve the quality of elections and bring new voices into politics. Lucina is a women's rights advocate and an expert in gender equality. We're diving into a topic that we frankly were a bit naive about before this conversation, and that is gendered disinformation.

Kassia Binkowski
Sabrina, these ladies define gendered disinformation as the spread of deceptive or inaccurate information and imagery against women political leaders, journalists and public figures. It's a mouthful. And as we discover over the course of this conversation, it's more present in social media than we ever could have imagined.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Yes, and the consequences are tremendous. Kristina and Lucina describe both the individual and societal impact of gender disinformation. Together, they are leading their initiative, She Persisted, to create a coalition of organizations and individuals invested in promoting women's digital rights. Take a listen. Lucina and Kristina, thank you both so much for joining us today.

Lucina Di Meco
Thank you. It's lovely to be here.

Kristina Wilfore
Happy to be with you.

Sabrina Merage Naim
We're excited to dive deeper into a topic that to be honest, we were only vaguely aware of before we started prepping for this conversation. And now we're really eager to learn more, because it seems like it's so much more widespread than maybe people understand. So let's set the stage for listeners. What is gendered disinformation?

Lucina Di Meco
Thank you. Yes, I have defined gender disinformation as really the spread of deceptive, inaccurate information and images. The images part is really important against particularly women political leaders, and journalists. Those are two categories that we see overwhelmingly being attacked with storylines that really draw on the traitors and most horrible misogyny playbook, and it tries to reinforce the idea that women are unfit for public office. They are either untrustworthy, or not intelligent enough or overly sexual. So these are stories that are very pervasive. And we have seen them happening all over the world.

Sabrina Merage Naim
And have you seen that it's been an effective tool to shift election results and to deter women from engaging in politics and running for office? Is it actually working as a tactic?

Lucina Di Meco
It's working in an excellent way in order to deter women from considering a political career, for bringing them out of office. We hear more and more young women being deterred from starting a political career, having leadership positions, or even just being more outspoken online because of the harassment and the gendered disinformation that they see women who are outspoken facing.

Kassia Binkowski
So I have so many questions I want to drill deeper into but before I do, how did you each come to care so deeply about this? Where did your own paths intersect with this work?

Kristina Wilfore
So yeah, I have been working in many different countries. I've been on the ground in over 27, from Afghanistan to Turkey, Serbia, Kosovo, Kenya. And my task really, as a democracy activist, is looking at the ways in which we can have the full and inclusive participation of women in politics, and addressing the barriers that no matter the culture or context, are trying to prevent women from leading and from having a voice and a say. And so there's lots of things that we end up focusing on in order to eliminate those barriers. You know, what is the way a political party nominates and looks for talent? How is it that structural opportunities like quotas create a more level playing field? What is the chance in which women are encouraged to think of themselves as leaders? You know, all of these different components are at play. But the strange like phenomenon, in essence, that has started, you know, emerging in all of the conversations and work that we were doing to really expose disinformation as a weaponized tactic to undermine the participation of women, often in places that are under authoritarian control. And that is a conversation around power, women are at the forefront of activist movements, are the change makers in many different contexts around the world, and that shift creates a threat. And that threat has been matched with a very organized system aided and abetted by digital technologies and big tech platform in order to make these weapons be aimed at women and against women. So my journey was really dealing for many years with the traditional kinds of things that we actually address and look at in order to bring more women into higher political participation. But this disinformation problem now has emerged as one of the largest, most incredibly dangerous tools that is being used to undermine women.

Lucina Di Meco
Yes. And similarly, I started looking at this from the perspective of how social media was impacting and changing the way women in politics do their job and run their campaigns and which challenges they're facing, how they're using it. I did a study a couple of years ago, She Persisted: Women, Politics and Power in the New Media World, that really looks at all those different dynamics. And I began realizing that the kind of attacks that women in politics were often receiving were really coordinated. So there was an element of abuse that came from individual people that might be against them. And then there was a heavy element of really coordination, and the entire campaigns and armies of trolls and bots attacking them with fake stories that really took to political motivation. And so that's where I began working with Kristina, to further look into those dynamics, and to try and find solutions.

Sabrina Merage Naim
And who is propagating this? I mean, Kristina, you mentioned this list of countries that you've worked on the ground. And really, when I think about these countries, I'm not thinking about places that are necessarily open to having women in higher political positions. They are highly patriarchal societies that in many ways oppress women from the top down to the bottom. But I'm curious whether that is in countries around the world that generally have those types of cultural kind of pressures on women or Western countries where we'd like to think that that's not the case, but very much is. Who is propagating this, and what can you tell us about the engines or individuals behind those strategies?

Kristina Wilfore
So I would first say that even from the US context, we can debate about whether we have a patriarchal society or not, but in terms of outcome of women in politics, we certainly do. I mean, it is an absolute shame that we are at the world average of participation of women in politics federally.

Kassia Binkowski
I mean, that's pathetic. I had no idea that we're at the world average for that.

Kristina Wilfore
Indeed. And, you know, there's some nuances to the US. We have a, first, past the post election system that is never very good for women, especially where you're trying to bring new voices to politics. We have a ridiculous, I would say corrupt, campaign finance system, where the amount on average that someone has to raise in a house race is around $9 million, I think now. So we have other unique barriers. And now on top of it, we do have very explicitly coordinated campaigns in which to undermine women, but as far as how those are organized in other parts of the world, this is why She Persisted and Lucina and I have been putting this topic into a larger context of what are authoritarians doing to manipulate in a media environment in which they can control and hold power. And unfortunately, they are aided by that in the way that social media is organized, and attacking women to undermine and make an issue of their participation in society is an easy get.

Sabrina Merage Naim
One of the things that we're talking about here is that a lot of the work that you guys focus on is gender disinformation in politics, and in leadership positions, kind of along the political spectrum, whether in the US or abroad. And what are other examples where you see this at play?

Lucina Di Meco
I think we see this really happening everywhere, as an effort to really erode women's rights and make sure that women do not advance. That ultimately these are efforts to silence women, and, you know, bring them back into the household and into a very limiting, traditional role, because women are advancing all over the world. And so I would see this really in the framework of a backlash and backsliding in many countries of women's rights. And as an effort to really silence those women in particular, who are making a difference and supporting, not only supporting a gender equality agenda, but really, you know, making a difference in women's lives, and towards the, you know, the advancement of that women's rights agenda.

Kassia Binkowski
So I just want to break something down, so that I understand it better. Does gender disinformation always result from fake news? Or is it often, or ever, a fixation on some otherwise trite, irrelevant detail that then just gets shared and shared and spread and spread and picked apart such that the real content, the substance isn't being covered anymore? Does that make sense? Is it the fixation on Hillary's outfit, you know, that essentially gets so much attention, that people are no longer talking about the issues at hand, the credibility, the quality, the qualifier things like that? Does that make sense? Is it always traced back to fake news?

Lucina Di Meco
I think we can think of this information more broadly, a little bit as, as both. And I'd love to hear Kristina's perspective on this. On the one hand, there is of course, the fake story, on the other hand is making so much noise, that the getting to the real information is basically impossible. And I think we're getting to a broader understanding of disinformation that does include this, the second dimension, and a lot of the stories happening around women are stories that in fact, are aimed at taking away the attention from their accomplishments, from what they have done, from their qualifications, and bringing it instead obsessively on stories that have nothing to do with their political commitments or proposals, and very often are also fake or are very sexual in nature. So when we think about this information, I also think it's important in the case of women, to always keep in mind the visual element to their stories, that, you know, are very much focused on a certain narrative, and then there is just the spread of images that are elusive in some ways, and, in fact, incredibly damaging of women's reputation. It makes women thinks not twice, but ten times before having a leadership role, because of the impact that this has on themselves, on their families. And so I think that it's both.

Sabrina Merage Naim
So Kristina, I want to drill into the specifics a little bit because you are an expert on dismantling gendered disinformation in political campaigns. And I want to, what high profile examples can you point to either domestically or internationally that really show this at scale, in the flesh?

Kristina Wilfore
That, your question, and our ability to communicate about this is also tied in with the problem. And let me explain what I mean by that, that even bringing attention to gendered disinformation and the specific attack lines and narratives are actually taking forward those attacks. So a group in the United States last cycle, created a women's disinformation defense program, bringing together organizations led by ultraviolet groups like Near All, Planned Parenthood, Higher Heights, She the People, really gathered to figure out how could they defend the attacks and look at the attacks against vice president Harris, and really help socialize what was going on among the media in a way that the media didn't write a headline that said, "oh, there's this thousands of memes, talking about you know, the Vice President sleeping her way to the top, like, it's even painful for me to repeat those words. Right? The fact that that is an accusation out there, living online, falsely promoted, you know, through the tactics of disinformation, even exposing it does damage.

Lucina Di Meco
Yeah. And I think, you know, it's really important to point out that we definitely see patterns. Most often the attacks, and the fake news are playing around a woman's morality. A lot of times, it's around her sexuality, sleeping her way to the top, having, you know, sexual partners, all the sexual preferences. The stories around sexuality are overwhelming. A woman being secretly transgender. There is an obsession around those stories that have to do with algorithmic preferences, too. Because those stories generate interest, they generate clicks, they end up being picked up and replicated by social media companies, because it generates profit to them at the expense, frankly, of those women as well as democracies at large. But if we look at where this is coming from, there is plenty of evidence that in many countries, it's state led, state sponsored, its political actors who are behind those attacks. We see it about the attacks against women in politics. We see it about the attacks against the female journalists who also are reporting that the majority of their attackers who aren't anonymous, are in fact, the political leaders attacking them for writing about them. So this is pretty intentional.

Kristina Wilfore
The International Center for Journalists did a report I think, just about 10 days ago, on Maria Reza. Has been one of the most effective journalist's encounter to some of the authoritarian activities in the Philippines. And so they did a groundbreaking study, very comprehensive assessment of the online violence against her as a journalist, they did a forensics analysis of the torrent of social media attacks that have been undermining a conversation around democracy and implicating her specifically, vilifying journalism, you know, as an icon of it in the process, in order to not just discredit her but discredit media, discredit journalism, and fair reporting as a tool. So you know, this goes beyond just women running for office, which is important enough, but it really goes to the heart of what kind of information systems are we able to have in the world in order to expose, you know, what is going on in any given country at any given time?

Kassia Binkowski
How is it different from the standard mudslinging that's been common in politics for years? How is it different from the trolling that public figures have always experienced online?

Lucina Di Meco
I think if we look at the numbers, it is really different. And that's why, for my report, I partnered with a data analytics company, because we really wanted to get a quantitative sense of how many attacks women and male candidates were receiving, in particular, during the study of the first month of the US Democratic primaries and the nature of those attacks. And what we saw was that, in fact, female candidates were attacked overwhelmingly more across the ideological spectrum than male candidates, and that the attacks against them, in fact, were very different. They were focused on their personality on their character, as opposed to their policy proposals, which was the norm for men. Further studies have seen this over and over again, not only women in politics are attacked way more than their male colleagues, they are also attacked in a substantially different way.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Let's take a step back to see the bigger picture for a second. And both of you started to allude to this. What's especially interesting to me is the bigger strategy isn't just about cutting down one woman. It's about undermining social change. It's about oppressing women in general. And we're curious about the social implications beyond the individual candidate being targeted. When the deck is already stacked against us, to think that gendered disinformation is also intended to suppress engagement is infuriating. So I'm curious to know, how does it deter women from engaging in politics down the road? And then what are the bigger social implications? You started talking about authoritarianism, what are some of the bigger social implications that happen when women do not have a path to run for public office?

Kristina Wilfore
Let me just give one example. And I'll ask Lucina to fill in some more. So what's really disturbing about this too, is that there's no categories of women, wherever they are in the spectrum of having a voice and being a leader, that are not subject to being silenced right now. There was a really great piece profiling what a problem this is, is that the women-led government in Finland, right? So these are women who are already in office. This is an incredible victory for women, in the hopes of this more equal future is not happening on the internet, and the NATO Strategic Communication Center of Excellence report, you know, found that the Finnish government, headed by a woman, is overly targeted by misogynistic online harassment. So it is present in every aspect, no matter where you are, on the spectrum of leadership, and I think the consequences to that, whether women are silent, because once they're already there, and supposed to have the mantle of leadership, or whether they're silenced, because of the risk this might pose to their family or reputation, or whether they're just prevented and deterred from entering politics, or entering a career of activism, because the costs are too high.

Lucina Di Meco
Yeah, I would, I would totally agree. And in my interviews with women in politics from all over the world, you see that the attacks never stop. They start the moment she announces her campaign, and they continue. Even when she's in office, even regardless of whatever great initiative she might be spearheading. And this is also something that we find that's very interesting, looking at how those attacks work on social media is that they are entirely separated in many ways from the news cycle. These means that regardless of, no news story happening around, say, a woman sleeping her way to the top or another horrible, you know, horrible, fake story. Those stories keep going on and on and on and on. They keep being replicated, they keep being amplified through the manosphere, as Kristina mentioned, and they never stop, even once they are disproven, even if there is nothing new happening, and that's just, they're just overwhelming for so many women that in fact, consider that this is at some point too much. And we can't afford for 50% of the talent pool to bail. You know, out of a political career, we have seen women leaders being some of the most effective leaders, for example, in fighting the COVID crisis, and we just can't afford to lose of the role of them because this is this is happening. And I think as Kristina mentioned, an important point to make is that this isn't happening by chance, but it's happening by design. There are algorithmic preferences that do privilege fake, outrageous, obscene content. Make this content be profitable, and therefore amplified. This isn't something we can do nothing about, this is something the social media companies can do a lot about and are deciding not to.

Kassia Binkowski
So I want to talk more about that because there is this huge second culprit here, responsible in large part for the spread of this content. You guys recently published a piece in Brookings, which read "attacks against women in politics have been weaponized for political gain and coordinated to take advantage of algorithmic designs and business models that incentivize fake content". And that comes back to the social media company, that comes back to the algorithm. So I want to break this down a little bit, if it is being strategically designed to spread, because it's what the algorithms pick up. What can you tell us about the role of technology and what needs to change in that system to prevent that?

Kristina Wilfore
This I view as the most important issue to get right for the sake of democracy globally in the world right now. And we are up against these titans of industry, that are not taking responsibility for their products that are risky and harmful to society, period. And so there's no one silver bullet policy reform that fixes this system, there's a variety of things that are being tried and led in other parts of the world, you have a UK Digital Services Act, you have movement in Canada, you have efforts to create a more fair system for monetizing, you know, journalism in Australia, you know, you have many different efforts that are being organized and also being met with fierce lobbying and opposition among the companies that are profiting off of this system. So we have to first sort of reinvent the way that we think about digital technology, and the business model behind it, which is broken, and it's breaking society.

Lucina Di Meco
Yes. And something I also want to say on this is that we in fact, are asking to think of social media standards that are much similar to the kind of standards and accountability that we demand from so many other companies in so many other sectors, we do not allow pharmaceutical companies to just put on the market products that are faulty products that end up being harmful, and then decide, oh, well, I guess we're gonna try better again, and never look into what's in the mix of what they're doing. This is what we have allowed social media companies to do. There is an absolute lack of transparency on how those algorithms work. I really think often of Facebook's infamous motto, to just move fast and break things. They have, in fact, moved fast and broken things. And among the things that are broken have been human rights, women's rights, and increasingly democracy.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Lucina, I hear what you're saying. And I want to take the other side for a minute for those of our audience members who might hear this and say, real democracy is about freedom of speech. It's not about censorship. It's not about cancel culture, you know, this progressive agenda that is holding people down and not allowing us to say what we really want. What do you say to that? And as a follow up, do you really believe that breaking the algorithm will have the meaningful effect on dismantling gendered disinformation that you are saying?

Lucina Di Meco
So on the freedom of expression, in particular, I would like to say I absolutely agree. I agree. And I wish I were free to express myself online without fearing the certain overwhelming amount of attacks, threats, rape threats, threast on my family, those things that are going to happen if I truly express myself freely online.

Sabrina Merage Naim
And you're speaking from personal experience as a journalist and political activist in Italy. You got those kinds of threats, right?

Lucina Di Meco
I'm a recovering political activist, I like to say. And yes, and certainly, you know, I was at a relatively lower level and probably the attacks I faced are a lot fewer and less horrific than the many attacks received by the women that I interviewed all over the world. And we know that women right now, even much worse for women of color, are not free to express themselves online, are effectively silenced and de-platformed every day. So I absolutely believe in the importance of freedom of expression. And I think we have to ensure that everyone is in fact, in an environment that's safe enough where they can begin to express themselves freely.

Kristina Wilfore
Yeah, so what we're asking for is really transparency alright? Transparency into the systems that bad actors are taking advantage of, and that the platforms themselves aren't policing their own product to protect. So I believe the First Amendment conversation is a false one. We shouldn't be actually affording First Amendment protections to private companies. You know, the First Amendment is ultimately about protecting people against the government. But we have a reverse situation, though, that allows, you know, over protections of these companies that are harming society, so we have to change our dialogue in order to get to the right remedies. And there's not an easy, quick solution, but at least let's be having an honest discussion about it.

Kassia Binkowski
So this feels like the perfect catch 22. If we look back, we step away from the system and look back at the woman being targeted, the journalist or the candidate. On the one hand, I'm fascinated about what you said that, you know, to name the problem, to name the the gendered disinformation actually pushes the strategy further and does a disservice by drawing more media attention to it. On the other hand, to walk away, to be oppressed by it, is the exact result that that strategy is hoping for. What is the appropriate response? How does that woman take back the narrative? How do we take back the narrative if there's so much of this going on? I mean, it feels really disheartening, to be honest.

Kristina Wilfore
It is discouraging, but I believe that we can mobilize in the way that other movements have. I mean, if we look at the most successful shifts in around women's rights in the world, it has been met by an activist movement. It hasn't been people in boardrooms, figuring out policy solutions, it's been people taking to the streets to define what kind of country they want to live in, and how they want to have dignity. And so you know, there's the power of that potential on this topic.

Lucina Di Meco
And I think it's also, there are many things that can be done to address this problem. And that have to be done. And that should be done as soon as possible. A lot falls on social media companies and governments to put pressure on those companies for really, you know, a new set of standards, and also just even to make sure that they do apply their own terms of service. And they are doing what they say that they are doing to protect their users. And so I think that there is there is definitely a lot that can be done for many different actors and including actors that are really having the important conversations on which type of new digital social contract we want to have. We just need to make sure that these digital social contract takes into account the realities of women.

Sabrina Merage Naim
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