AI and Sexism: The Fight Against Misogyny Online (Laura Bates)

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0:43BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. OK, this is it. Episode one of Radical with Amol Rajan. I am so excited and so grateful for your company. I really do feel like I've been waiting a very, very long time for this. And I think we're going to do great things together. starting with a fascinating, really, really revelatory conversation with Laura Bates. She is one of the most influential feminists in Britain and beyond. And the conversation that we've had, which is not just a conversation about tomorrow, actually, but also a conversation about today, covers toxic algorithms. It covers modern misogyny and it covers the way in which social media and artificial intelligence is radicalizing.

1:27and that was her word not mine radicalizing a new generation of young men and boys and often really quite young boys there is now an awareness of let's talk about andrew tate we want to talk about the manosphere stuff but what schools are horrified by and generally speaking have absolutely no awareness of is the number of children in the uk now who are using this technology to create pornographic deepfakes of their female peers and also of their female teachers she is sounding the alarm about how artificial intelligence is already fueling violence against women and girls. And one of the points you're about to hear her make is that often these days, it's the youngest boys who have the most regressive and appalling views of women.

2:13And that's because of technology. And I should say that as a, broadly speaking, technophile and techno-optimist who lives and breathes AI, who reads the books about it and listens to the podcasts, I was absolutely shocked about the ways in which artificial intelligence is already being used today to advance an agenda that sadly is as old as humanity itself.

2:47Now, before we start, can I just take a moment to ask you to subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds? because it really would mean so much to me and the whole team working on this podcast as we begin on this journey together. Also, if you do subscribe, make sure you've got push notifications turned on and that way you'll get an alert whenever we publish a new episode and you will never miss out. So please join our club, join the pod squad. Let's be radical together. All you've got to do is hit subscribe and we, I, the whole team would be so grateful.

3:23Ready to roll. Okay, here we go. Laura, welcome. Thank you. How are you? I'm good, thanks. Is this part of a massive book tour? I see on Instagram and elsewhere that you've done like a thousand interviews. I feel like, do you get exhausted when you talk about the same subject many, many times? Would you have to kind of gee yourself up and be like, it's fine, I can go again, I'm really into the subject? No, no, the opposite. This is the really great bit for me because I sit in a room on my own panicking about really awful things for two years and kind of thinking, this can't be right, can it? am I the only one?

3:51And then I get to go and talk to people about it and it really helps to think I'm not going crazy. Other people care about this too. Well, other people really care about it. Look, we'll get into it in painful detail in a bit, but it is worth saying, this is a book about some pretty dark stuff. It's at the kind of frontier. I mean, I read it thinking that it would be slightly more of a philosophical tome about the new age of sexism. And in fact, it's about a horrible world, which is here today. Already, yeah. It's about an alarm bell. It's about saying this isn't some future potential dystopian risk of robots taking over the world.

4:30It's happening now and it's women and girls' lives on the line now. Yeah, we need to do something about it. Before we talk about the new age of sexism, I want to talk a little bit about the old age of sexism and how you came to it. Because I realised when I first came across Everyday Sexism, which you launched in 2012, you became a very influential campaigner and lots of people will know of your work, but they might not know a huge amount about how you came to that. Did you grow up in a feminist household? Not particularly insofar as we didn't explicitly discuss feminism. I don't think I knew what the word feminism meant until I was in my 20s.

5:06But I think for me, there was so much that went unspoken and unsaid. There was so much in my early childhood experiences that had really indoctrinated me into this sense that this was normal. It was the way things were. and it was not until I left university I was living in London I was in my early 20s and I had a just a terrible week um that I had a kind of light bulb moment I was on my way home one day living in north London a man started following me he was kind of sexually propositioning me pretty explicitly he wasn't taking no for an answer I felt really unsafe um a few nights later I was on the bus quite late in the evening I was on the phone to my mum when a man sitting next to me put his hand between my legs and because I was on the phone to my mum I blurted it out I said I'm on the bus this guy just groped me this guy's touching me and everybody on the bus heard and everybody looked away everybody looked out the window no one said a word and then I was walking down the street literally again just a couple of days later broad daylight walking past some guys who were working on the back of a truck and they just started talking about you know pieces of my body, things that they would do to me.

6:15And at the end of the week, I just suddenly had this moment of realisation that if any one of those things had happened in a week on its own, I probably never would have thought twice about it because it was so normal. I was so used to it. Really? Yeah. Oh, God, yeah. I mean, by that point, I had been sexually assaulted. I was sexually harassed, you know, on more than a weekly basis. I had experienced harassment in part-time jobs. I'd experienced harassment at university you know by that point it was something that I was so inured to and I think like so many of the women and girls I then went on to speak to there was this sense of well yeah on my way to meet you just now this happened yesterday this happens every day at work this happens if we stopped to talk about it we'd never get anything else done when you said that you growing up there are all these things ingrained I mean presumably you don't mean in your kind of family setting no in the society that you grew up in where did you grow up when to give us a sense of the era.

7:10Yeah, so I initially went to school and grew up in Hackney in London and then later on in Somerset in the West Country. And everything from, you know, I think from the age of about 12 or 13. This is 90s. Knowing, yeah, knowing that you didn't feel safe in public spaces, that if you saw a group of men coming up, you would cross the street, that you would walk home with your keys between your fingers, that you wouldn't wear headphones so you could hear if someone was about to come up behind you or shout at you. you'd wear flat shoes because you'd be thinking ahead that you might need to run you would change clothes before you went out because you'll be anticipating the harassment that you were going to get you would be indoctrinated into the idea that you should be holding your hand over your drink wherever you went if you went out that you must text each other when you get home safely get a cab home but not the wrong kind of cab you know that and a million other ways that you learn from a very very young age that you weren't safe but you know also experiences of being rated out of 10 by boys at school and you know and so on and so on and so on and in a million different ways a million tiny pinpricks that add up to a life just to understand the kind of the campaign that you set up in 2012 that was about raising awareness particularly among men about as you say this kind of gulf this incongruity between female lived experience and uh what kind of particularly men perceived to be their experience what was the relationship between that and a kind of an older tradition of feminism, post-war feminism in particular.

8:37I mean, people will know things like the Wages for Housework movement in the 1980s, which had specific economic policy goals. It was obviously a social awareness part of it, but it was about an economic imbalance. Yours was, as I understand it, a slightly different campaign. What did you see as a relationship between your feminism and that older tradition? So I think the connection with that particular campaign would be around the idea of the personal being political, the idea of individual lived experiences, including in the domestic sphere having political ramifications. But perhaps you would say that my work was more rooted in the kind of 1970s consciousness raising circles of particularly US feminists.

9:12And this is a pattern that we've seen again and again, then Tarana Burke with her Me Too movement, then everyone's invited later on, the idea that telling our stories is powerful and a radical revolutionary act. And that was something that I didn't anticipate. I thought I was starting a project to raise awareness and get men to listen and to realise what was going on. What I didn't realise was the incredibly moving, cathartic, huge impact it would have for women and girls to have their stories heard and listened to and believed and to know that they weren't alone. Why was that radical? I think because we were conditioned to be quiet.

9:50Because you have to understand from childhood, I know it's so easy to hear everything I've said earlier and think what you were, you hadn't stopped and realised that you were living in this kind of nightmarish situation. It's so hard to understand, I think. When you're growing up as a girl, you are indoctrinated into the idea that you're being silly, you're overreacting, you're making a fuss about nothing. He just likes you. It's just boys being boys. It's a compliment. Lighten up, love. Get a sense of humour. Take it as a joke. I'm sure he didn't mean it that way. You've got the wrong end of the stick.

10:16Well, what were you doing? What were you wearing when it happened? You know, maybe you were leading him on. Had you been drinking? There are a million ways that we are indoctrinated societally into not recognising our own oppression, harassment, abuse, and even when we do, into really having quite deep-seated conviction that we might be somehow to blame. And that sense that you said that the gulf is explained, the gulf between the lived experience of lots of women and what men perceive to be the experience, is explained partly by this feeling, particularly among men, but not exclusively, that we've come a long way.

10:48You don't get that sort of thing anymore. Is it also true to say, however, that we have come a long way, that there were important victories. You can hold these two ideas in your head at the same time, obviously. There were actually significant victories chalked up by post-war feminists. It took a hell of a lot of fighting and struggle and pain. What do you think were the great victories of post-war feminism, even if it's a kind of unfinished revolution? Oh, absolutely. I mean, the Equality Act in particular for me was huge and so, so significant. Of course, we are making progress. Things are improving.

11:22The problem is that it's complicated. So partly there are things that are getting worse at the same time. It isn't all moving in the same direction. But also these things are all relative, right? So yeah, we have improved in terms of conditions for women in the workplace. But we also know that still over half of all women and two thirds of young women experience workplace sexual harassment. Yes, it's illegal now to sack a woman because she becomes pregnant. But we also know that over 50 ,000 women lose their jobs every year to maternity discrimination. And the motherhood penalty is just a fact.

11:53It's an economic fact that it costs women hugely in terms of career breaks. What do you think has gone backwards? You say we've made some victories. What are the things that are getting worse? I would say that we are living in a really worrying age in terms of a very regressive backlash amongst the youngest men in our society. And the reason for this is because of a really algorithmically facilitated form of mass radicalisation that is happening to young men and boys. This is something we've never seen. So attitudes have always over time gradually got better. And if you look at things like the British Attitude Survey and others, things that look at public opinion over the decades, what they've always found is that a depressing proportion of our society thinks, for example, women should be in the kitchen.

12:35Women are to blame for being raped if they were flirting, that kind of thing. But it has always been the case that those attitudes were most concentrated amongst the oldest cohorts surveyed. So there's always been this idea that ideas change gradually over time and younger people are more progressive. And liberal, yeah. And have a greater degree of social tolerance and greater respect for women. That's right. Less inclination to see them as objects for exploitation. Right. But what we're seeing now for the first time in history is that repeated studies are suggesting that now the most misogynistic, outdated, regressive attitudes towards women and girls are the most common amongst the youngest cohort surveyed for the first time ever.

13:13So that's the less good connotation of the word radical, the radicalisation to extreme and unpleasant views. what is the nature of that radicalization what's happening so this is it's really important to say this isn't about an inherently misogynistic generation of young men and boys this is a generation of children who are accessing particularly social media sites and other online environments where they are being groomed it's just that we don't use the word grooming to describe it they are being radicalized it's just that we don't use the word radicalization to describe it by incredibly powerful social media algorithms that we know are trained not to serve them the most relevant or the highest quality content but increasingly extreme content to grab their attention right we live in an attention economy in an attention economy uh you know when data and information is super abundant our attention becomes a scarce resource that's right the most powerful companies in human history the most powerful private organizations have become that powerful and have developed this asymmetry of wealth and knowledge and power by grabbing our attention.

14:16And one way of doing that is by feeding us controversial, extreme, grabby stuff. Yeah. So that's not such a problem if you're looking up a recipe and suddenly a few recommended videos later you're looking at an all you can eat hot dog eating contest. But it does become significant when suddenly you're being served increasingly extreme misogyny. So if you're a teenage boy today and you set up a TikTok account in the name of a teenage boy, you tell it you're a teenage boy on average it takes less than half an hour before the first piece of extreme misogynistic content will be served directly into your feed you don't have to go looking for it it comes to you and that is a level of backlash that we've never seen before the backlash has always existed to perceive social justice progress but this is the first time in history that it has been given this absolute turbocharged boost of algorithm one of the problems is that social media companies will do two things they'll point to their regulations which they themselves repeatedly break and the other thing that they will say is it's too difficult it's too big millions of people around the world are using our products it's too fast moving content is massive and proliferating how can you possibly expect us to be reasonably on top of this is that not a reasonable thing for them to say well how would we respond if a multinational food conglomerate said that.

15:32If they said millions of people around the world are going to eat our products every day, it's too big. We've got factories all over the world. A few people are going to die of salmonella. You can't hold us responsible for that. Well, Laura, a TikTok spokesperson, Lewis, who's a genius producer here, and who knows about the BBC rules around fairness, accuracy and impartiality, has let me know that a TikTok spokesperson said, and I quote, misogyny has long been prohibited on TikTok and we proactively detect 93 % of content we remove for breaking our rules on hate. The methodology used in this report does not reflect, this is a reference report about this very subject, does not reflect how real people experience TikTok.

16:12What would you say to that? I just think it's laughable. I mean, I'm in schools, I work with tens of thousands of young people every year. I had a child in the front of an assembly the other day who was probably 12 years old, and he put his hand up at the end of the talk and said, but what about all the women who are lying about rape? They're ruining men's lives. this is happening every day and I said really how do you know and he said I saw it on TikTok they don't follow their own standards they just don't and it's not just TikTok you know it's important to say if we talk about something like the metaverse another study recently found that people are users are exposed to abusive behavior every seven minutes on average in the metaverse and again meta points to its policies and its reporting procedures and it was a study by the Center for Countering Digital Hate what they did was they looked at a hundred violations that they'd found 100 abusive incidents they could only report half of them because meta only allows you to report things that fit into their predefined categories so they reported 50 and no action was taken on any of them there wasn't even any response so i was the bbc's media editor for six years um and i covered these companies and you're absolutely right that one of their central arguments is that look the internet's been this great victory for freedom yeah and it's allowed for instance creators to um put content out there without having to be mediated by other commissioners or intermediaries like journalists, that will come with some downsides.

17:28But in the end, such is the volume of content that you face a decision. Do you ban it altogether, which most people wouldn't want? Or do you say that because there's so much volume of content, what you're going to have to do is use machinery rather than manpower to try to moderate some of that stuff or try and take some of it down. And they would say that they most, most of the time do take that stuff down. What you're saying is that despite their best efforts or whatever they might say, the reality is that a generation of boys are growing up seeing stuff they shouldn't see. Absolutely. And I would also really push back against the idea that those are the only two options.

18:03Because the reality is that these are companies that have profits in the region of$30 billion a year. The idea that they couldn't, if they chose to, invest significantly in highly trained, resourced and supported human moderators is nonsense. It's not a priority. They say they've hired tens of thousands of moderators. It's just, but you know, they have the money to do it if they wanted to. And this isn't a nice to have. It's not about saying, you know, oh, please do this as a favour for us. You know, we're so lucky to get to use your products for free. We're not using their products for free because they are able to scrape and to sell our data.

18:36Our, you know, when we get on to talking about the metaverse, our eye movement tracking technology, you know, every single thing about our behaviour as consumers will be an enormously valuable resource for them. Well, the detail in your book is genuinely terrifying of what some of these technologies do. Can we just go back a second? Because you talked about how you spend a lot of time in schools and talking to young boys, which is something I do as well. In fact, for the Today program a few weeks ago, I went into an extraordinarily intense high security establishment where young boys who had done the worst possible things you can do.

19:09Talked to me a bit about social media, but they also talked to me about what it is to be a boy and what it is to be a man. And I know you've given a lot of thought to this subject. And I think actually, in a way, it informs your concern about the new age of sexism. So I just wonder if we could talk a little bit about that, because we've had conversations on the Today programme, the Today podcast before this, about the crisis of masculinity, if there is one. And one of the things that sometimes I think happens there is that people go very quickly to Andrew Tate and extreme misogyny. Yeah. Before we get there, do you have any sympathy with the argument of people like Richard Reeves, who wrote of boys and men, that there is a kind of broader cultural, social crisis that young boys and men are facing?

19:52Absolutely. I mean, we know that there is a mental health crisis amongst young people, particularly amongst young men with suicide, the leading cause of death for men under the age of 50. what I can test is the notion that these are two opposite and separate problems and that if you support women you are undermining and ignoring the issues faced by men and boys exactly what Richard Reeds would say that it's not a zero-sum game yeah well not only that I would actually go a step further and say that this is part of the same problem it's not just that we can care at the same time about issues affecting different groups which of course we can I would go further than that and say the exact same problems that are seeing young men growing up in a world that teaches them they have to perform a very specific kind of masculinity that is repressive to them that prevents them from feeling able to reach out for help or be vulnerable or talk about their feelings or develop really strong affectionate relationships is the same system the same stereotypes that on the flip side are seeing girls told that they're hormonal and hysterical that they're over emotional and shouldn't go into science labs because they'll either cry or fall in love with the scientists it's interesting it's very interesting you say that because that i was thinking where's the point going to come where you might disagree with richard reeds and i think I just found it because I don't want to misrepresent him and he can come back on this podcast and talk to us about it.

21:03Because what you just said there was really interesting. You said that the messages that boys are getting, often algorithmically groomed and originating online, are messages about the value of female subjugation and exploitation. And one of the arguments that people, not just like Richard Reid, so I don't want to mischaracterise, but lots of people in this space make, is that we have a cultural script for young boys at the moment. and again it's not a zero-sum game it's not about our attitude to girls it's about our attitude to boys we have a cultural script for young boys which tells them to sort of deny who they really are that the script of modern feminism post post post-war feminism or wherever it might be is a series of do's you know do be powerful do go and work do be the best person you can do live your best life and what a lot of boys are hearing it's not my view necessarily but it's the view of lots of people in this field and arena, what a lot of boys are hearing is a series of don'ts.

21:57Don't feel that thing you feel. Don't aspire to have that money. Don't buy that car. Don't want that material thing. Don't try and be the best you can be. And I just wonder what you think about whether or not we have got the right cultural script for young boys, not just in terms of the algorithmic feeding of nasty stuff, but in terms of a broader mainstream cultural story about what they should become. Yeah, absolutely. I think that where I might have a difference opinion is about where that story is coming from and where that particular push for boys is coming from. So there's a particularly kind of trendy thing at the moment for people to say modern feminism has alienated boys.

22:33Boys are feeling left behind. They're feeling scolded. They're feeling like they can't do anything right. And as a result, they are turning to influencers like Andrew Tate. They're turning to extreme misogyny online. What I would suggest is that that is to take the narrative spouted by guys like Tate and to make it the mainstream narrative without questioning. I don't think that teenage boys are turning to Andrew Tate because they've read an article in The Guardian and they're feeling a bit aggrieved. I think they're turning to Andrew Tate because they set up a TikTok account and within 30 minutes his content is being promoted into their feed.

23:03So I think, again, we're looking for any possible opportunity to avoid placing responsibility with social media companies for the role that they are playing in this radicalisation.

23:16I hope you're enjoying this conversation with Laura Bates. You can hear the rest of it in just a moment, but I wanted to jump in here for a brief second to say, if you are enjoying this conversation, please do us a favour, just subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds, and that way we can build a community of radicals, the pod squad. We get great feedback from you about what we're doing well and not so well and what we need to do more of or less of. And crucially, you won't miss future episodes. So please subscribe. And if you do subscribe, just make sure you go into your settings and you've got push notifications turned on.

23:50That way you'll get an alert whenever we publish a new episode and you'll never have to miss out on Radical. Now, thank you. And back to Laura Bates. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

24:43Most people would say that one of the great victories of post-war Britain has been the mass entry, maybe an unfinished revolution, but the mass entry of women into the workplace. And one consequence of that, you know, it's a net good thing, but one consequence of that is that a lot of men have lost their monopoly on the workplace. And when you put that alongside de-industrialisation in lots and lots of places, from the Ford motor plant in Dagenham to the coastal towns, which have lost kind of mining, deindustrialization across much of the Western world, whether it's globalization or automation, whatever it might be.

25:13There was an old reliable script that men for centuries, which happened to be at a time when female emancipation was not what it is now, when men had a kind of reliable story for how they would kind of economically earn and provide. and the displacement of that story or the undermining of that story by deindustrialization and also by the entry of women into the workplace, even if that's a good thing, that might also be one of the reasons that men are feeling a little bit discombobulated. I think obviously, I mean, that's a huge, huge issue that you've just described. But again, I would caution against oversimplification here.

25:49When I was spending two years in extreme online misogynistic spaces to research my book, men who hate women, it was really clear within those spaces that we were not just talking about disenfranchised working class white men. You know, we are definitely talking here about highly educated, you know, college educated men and boys who are very active in these spaces. And also, you know, to a degree, like, yes, of course, we have seen those shifts in the workplace. This is not, however, a world in which women are dominating professionally. And I think that's important to say we still have a significant gender pay gap we still have tens of thousands of women every year being lost from the workforce because of maternity discrimination we still have a situation where there are almost three times as men named john running footsie 100 companies as all the women put together we still have a situation where equal pay which is a legal right isn't always universally enforced absolutely and i mean the big issue here is that social attitudes lag far behind legislation it's illegal to discriminate against a woman because she's pregnant but the problem is that social attitudes is still incredibly common for people to think well you know why should companies bear the burden of paying for women to go off and have babies so when you say that especially for the research that but men who hate women you looked at lots of different stages of the income ladder and they all shared this trope which is they hated women did they have a common kind of personality type what were the kind of common elements if you like what do men who hate women share other than they hate women if you know what i mean is it They come from particular types of family or particular personality types?

27:19I would say that they share what Michael Kimmel would describe as a grieved entitlement. A sense that as men they have an inherent entitlement to women's bodies and to sex explicitly. And a shared dehumanisation of women. A view of women as a dehumanised commodity. And a sense of their own entitlement to some element of that commodity. And from that starting point they then take very different trajectories. so you have some groups like so-called men going their own way who will say women are so inherently toxic and dangerous that at this point men have to cut them out of their lives altogether incels who believe that that's involuntary celibates so i should say right so-called incels men who think that if they're not having sex and they'd like to be women should be punished as a result with physical and sexual violence you've also got pickup artists multi-million dollar international industry teaching men that actually if you think of women as a kind of dehumanized sex slot machine where incels think that the slot machine is rigged against them and will never pay out pickup artists believe that you can learn the tricks and tips that will force that machine to pay out over and over again whether it wants to or not but all of these things have at their root the dehumanization of women so to what extent is the new age of sexism the old age of sexism accelerated by technology absolutely it's the old age of sexism on steroids the problem is that you know we were talking earlier about social media and how it has become inextricably intertwined with many areas of our lives socially our love lives our working lives what we are about to see with ai is going to be like that on a scale a million times give us some practical examples so if you are applying for a job already we know that 40 percent of uk companies are using ai tools in their recruitment processes and we know that some of those ai tools have been proven actively to discriminate against women and girls.

29:10Already tomorrow, if you apply for a loan, we know that the credit scoring AI tools used by global financial services companies discriminate actively against women. And that's so significant. We already have a$17 billion global gender credit gap. There are healthcare algorithms already being used across US healthcare systems to determine patients in need of extra care. There are around 200 million patients under the care of trust where these algorithms are being used but we know that they actively downgrade the number of black patients identified for needing extra care by more than half and the reason for that isn't because they're actively or deliberately discriminatory it's because they discriminate by proxy so in that particular case they use spending on patients as a proxy for level of need and thereby unwittingly re-entrench already existing racism within the system so there's two other examples i can think of which are shocking when you think about them.

30:05One is pornography. And pornography has obviously become infinitely more readily and quickly accessible than it was in the 90s when you were growing up and I was growing up. One of the things that AI allows you to do is to create videos, which you could do basically for free using AI technology, where really there's no gap between a fantasy or a desire, a kind of lustful fantasy and a pretty instant video you can get, which might have, for instance, it might be a deep fake, it might be a video that seems to simulate what a celebrity could do. And the second and related example is an app, which I mean, I think of myself as pretty clued up about AI, but one of the wonderful things about people like you and books like yours is you learn an awful lot, including stuff you wish you didn't know, like an app called, I think it's Cloth Off.