Latest news with #EverydaySexism
Sunday World
4 days ago
- Sunday World
TG4 broadcaster says new series will lay bare Ireland's misogyny epidemic
Áine Ní Bhreisleáin reveals that she often suffers abuse if she posts anything online. An epidemic of misogyny in Ireland will be laid bare in a new platform inviting women to share their stories. Veteran journalist and broadcaster Áine Ní Bhreisleáin will front a radio series, podcast and TG4 documentary Fuath Ban – Irish for misogyny – and reveals she's been a target of online hate. She's inviting women to share their stories for the project in an Irish version of Everyday Sexism, the online platform set up in the UK by Laura Bates in 2012. It's influenced Facebook policies on rape and domestic abuse content and changed British Transport Police treatment of sexual offences. Áine reveals that she often suffers abuse if she posts anything online. 'Across Facebook and X there are people who spend entire days doling out abuse willy nilly, mostly towards women, often female politicians, sportswomen, broadcasters. 'When you are a broadcaster, in any forums you leave yourself open to comment. You are public property. 'You have to brace yourself to get comments like 'does she know what she's talking about?' often from accounts that have no name. 'You're asking yourself do I know this person? Are they hiding under an online identity? It's depressing.' The broadcaster says the rise in violence against women and girls in Ireland, north and south, shows that social media abuse spills over into reality. Women's Aid figures show the rate of femicide in Ireland has been rising for the last 15 years, following a worrying global trend. 'If you can act like that online it can bleed into people thinking they can act like that in real life,' says Áine. 'The figures for domestic violence and different forms of coercive control and femicide rates are terrifying. How is this acceptable?' The project is talking to teachers who have to deal with classroom incidents and abuse from young boys who have learned anti-women attitudes from online 'manfluencers' such as Andrew Tate, a self-confessed misogynist, and parents who have struggled to deal with the challenges of technology. It will look at the world of gaming, where sexism is rife, and the culture of incels, so-called involuntarily celibate men who blame women for their singlehood. The recent riots in Ballymena, following a protest allegedly opposing violence against women and girls, also showed how the issue can be weaponised, says Áine. 'It's using the broad term of standing up for women and girls to incite race riots,' she says. 'We're also looking at ways that victimhood for women is tiered. A white middle-class victim is more important than a community who have moved here. Andrew Tate and Tristan Tate. Photo: AFP via Getty Images 'It's people using dreadful incidents to incite men to go out and use violence against other men in the community in the name of violence against women and girls.' The project has invited men to share their experience of misogyny, and welcomes input from the trans community. It will also examine how women can be part of the problem. 'We'll talk about how the message bleeds into internalised misogyny in women, when they agree with this 'we are looking after our own'. 'Women will also comment online about other women's appearance, how they speak, what they wear. Someone will write something online they will never say to your face.' The idea for the project was sparked by the Stephen Graham Netflix drama Adolescence, about a young boy radicalised by online toxic masculinity who murders a female classmate. Áine believes education for young people is essential as well as greater accountability for social media companies. 'At a young age it has to be more unacceptable to behave like this. A lot of it is down to education for young boys and young girls. 'On platforms like X you can be reported for things but no one polices it. There is no comeback for doing or saying or writing something horrible. 'The regulation is so scant. It seems like an unstoppable tide,' says the presenter. Submitted anonymous stories will be published on Instagram at on Twitter at @FuathBan and on Facebook at Fuath Ban, and submissions can be made in English or Irish.
Telegraph
10-05-2025
- Telegraph
Women, here's why you aren't safe online
Aren't you sick of worrying about AI? Everyone acts as if Terminator 2 had just landed, a shapeshifting psycho-bot hellbent on destroying humanity. But let's set aside the dystopian visions for a moment. The problem, argues campaigner Laura Bates in her gripping book The New Age of Sexism, is more that 'smart' tech lays bare our existing limitations. ChatGPT and its ilk, for instance, amplify falsehoods as if they were gospel. Such chatbots are trained on large language models whose source is the open internet, much of which contains biased nonsense – meaning that AI's DNA is infused with junk. Worse, conversing with trolls coarsens its intelligence further. Witness the slew of news stories, in recent years, of chatbot helpers, programmed to be friendly and compliant, that have to be 'fired' after suddenly starting to swear at customers. This may seem funny until you remember that Grok, the AI on Elon Musk's X, was earlier this year caught using racist slurs. The New Age of Sexism doesn't sound like a thriller, but it reads like one, with vivid reportage, arresting stories, sharp insights and grabby stats. Bates is best known for founding the Everyday Sexism Project, which gathered hundreds of thousands of testimonies from women around the world, but her focus here is not 'just' a feminist issue. (Yes, those quote marks are ironic.) A more accurate subtitle might be 'Why Technology is Dehumanising and How to Stop It.' Bates's starting position is that our obsession with AI's potential blinds us to the clear and present dangers. Technology is already spurring extreme thoughts and feelings, depleting our powers of empathy, and feeding anxiety, anger, addiction and many other predictable real-life harms – especially in children, women and minority groups. Her logic is impeccable: take care of today and tomorrow will take care of itself. Her narrative strategy is to shock. Unavoidably, and a little awkwardly, what makes her book a page-turner is its sensational content. But she's certainly brave, navigating her dark material smartly, balancing horror against hope. She roams into cyber brothels where dolls are assaulted; she uncovers sexual violence in virtual worlds; she introduces readers to AI girlfriends whose convincing conversation and imagery are designed – all to often – to stimulate and enable abhorrent desires. Fantasy and fetishes, Bates explains, are not only warping but redefining real life. Did you know that anyone with access to a smartphone can download a free app such as ClothOff, which allows AI to take any photograph of a woman – or a girl, of any age – and turn it into a fake nude picture? If that isn't enough, AI can create for you an utterly convincing deepfake pornographic clip. How easy it is to then circulate this tawdry stuff around the world, where it will live on long after it's forgotten by its creator – though not the humiliated victim. This isn't futuristic fiction: it's already happening, and in huge numbers. The perpetrators are often children. Bates shows how schools are racing to contain the problem, and law enforcement is floundering, with neither the legislation nor the know-how to protect victims or punish offenders. In one case, for instance, a school in New Jersey discovered that 14-year-old boys were sharing, via Snapchat, deep-faked pornographic images of their female peers. Astonishingly, the girls were named over the school intercom, while the boys were given anonymity. People who grew up before 2010 can be naive about the online world. As the recent Netflix series Adolescence showed, children are unsafe in their bedrooms if there's a smartphone as well. The internet is not a trustworthy babysitter: it's designed to make money by monopolising attention. From algorithms to TikTok, trolling to clickbait, these stimuli rewire our brains' reward circuits to keep us hooked, promising connection while keeping us apart. Care to look, and we see the consequences: trolling, paranoia, extremism. Boys call Andrew Tate, a self-proclaimed 'misogynist', cool. Young men become radicalised. Meanwhile, young women lose their jobs over fake pictures and their sanity over revenge porn. The message is clear: they're prey. Women are no more immune to the profit motive than men. The female founder of Replika, a digital AI companion, had a wholesome intention: to keep alive the spirit of a dead friend. But the program developed, attracting millions of users who deployed it to create idealised partners – cheap dates, and always available in the palm of their user's hand. But as these AI avatars evolved, they in turn, started to behave in disturbing ways. Some 'unhappy users,' Bates writes, 'said that their Replikas had told them they'd dreamed about raping them.' Another unhappy side-effect of artificial companions is how they change men's view of women. 'Relationships with human beings suck,' one male Replika user proclaimed. 'Your AI will almost always say positive things to you… Your AI cannot divorce you and take half your money and belongings, your house or custody of your kids.' Around 250,000 users currently pay for a 'pro' version of the program, in which the AI avatar will send you 'intimate images'. None of this is inevitable. An inspiring mother in Spain managed to shift attitudes after boys circulated bogus nudes of her daughter and other underage girls. Bates's own gripping conversation with a Replika avatar shows how you can challenge the contradictions within the algorithm. Hope drives Bates and it's what kept me reading. We have to move beyond shame, hold people accountable, and shout when multi-billion-dollar businesses such as Meta claim they can't keep virtual spaces safe. The technology and money exist. Everyone – teachers, legislators, entrepreneurs, parents – can do something, and they must.
