Misogyny, boomers, and China just got Krissed

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0:30to bbc.com and the BBC app. Find out more at bbc.com slash unlimited. It's been a pretty bad week for boomers on the internet, hasn't it? First, you had Paul McCartney being banned from Reddit after posting photos of his own gig. You had Christy Noam's husband being outed as having a very strange fetish online. You had Jonathan the Tortoise, the super boomer, 194 years old, has died, or has he? And are any of these people boomers or not to be discussed? The other thing that we're talking about on the podcast is the evolution of misogyny on social media and especially how AI is being weaponised in that kind of abuse.

1:12And why are people in China changing their profile pictures to Kris Jenner?

1:23OK, Matt, do you know this MP Hannah Spencer? The winner of the Gorton and Denton by-election. Exactly. Member of the Green Party has now arrived in Parliament and she has found herself subject to some pretty horrible online abuse, but particularly involving AI grog. Yes. So she gave her maiden speech in Parliament and was immediately subject to criticism based on what she was wearing. Yeah, exactly. And this was on International Women's Day, ironic. And I've spoken to her, so wanted to get in touch to see what she thought about this. There's been a whole range of different abuse that she's been targeted with, some of the more traditional stuff like slurs, other horrible posts.

2:00But the way that AI has been used to target her has been various edits, including one that went particularly viral that shows her giving her speech. She is wearing bright colours. She's got long blonde hair. She, you know, doesn't look like perhaps your stereotypical historical MP. and the edits that have been made using Grok, you know, they put her in like a crisp white shirt with a skirt and her hair's different and she just does not look the same. Like shorter, straightened hair. Yeah, exactly. She looks much more sort of serious. And I think it just triggers a really interesting discussion about how misogyny on social media has evolved.

2:35This was what she had to say about those kinds of edits that she's seen since being elected. The AI edits, yeah, changing my appearance and stuff. I think it's just another way that women in particular are attacked for the way that they look. Some of it has genuinely like I've just found it so ridiculous. It's laughable. But obviously, there's a serious undertone to in the way that we're expected to live and meet certain standards that men don't. But Grok and AI have a huge part to play in this because not least they are making it quick and fast. People creating misinformation and then being able to share it.

3:12and it is being used to target women and girls and the lack of regulation on that is really, really alarming. If we're honest, like women's appearances being critiqued in general, nothing new, but on social media, it can just feel particularly sort of ferocious and pervasive. And then when you've got AI chucked in there, so I was looking at some of the accounts that have been sharing this stuff, they're often very overtly political. Like they don't agree with Hannah Spencer's politics and they're going after things that are not like what she thinks or her policies or anything like that. It's about what she looks.

3:44It's about her class. It's about her gender. And that's where this tips into abuse rather than being like fair comment or criticism. Yeah, which is ridiculous because the second you start criticizing someone based on what they wear rather than their politics, you've lost the argument. Obviously, men do face similar kinds of things. Like, I mean, look at the criticisms of Trump's appearance of Rishi Sunak's shoes, of not wearing a tie as a common criticism of Thornet Men. Zelensky. But what's different when it's women being criticized, there's a particularly misogynistic bent to it. Yeah. And I think that gender is baked into the abuse.

4:18Like when you look at the post about men, they often won't be using slurs in the same way. They might be critical of their appearance, but they won't be using words that are provocative or derogatory or even encouraging like attacks and anger and violence. You know, real world consequences to this stuff. Like that's how misinformation kind of interacts with abuse, really, because you'll often have really pervasive mistruths about particularly, I would say, women or minorities in public life. And I think that you can then get to the place where actually you've got politicians who are like worried about going and meeting people in their constituents or experience that anger face to face.

4:51And it's quite hard to deal with. And that's something that Hannah Spencer said she has she has sort of encountered in the real world. It's not just on social media. there are things that could be brought in that would make it harder for social media companies to get away with the allowing so much misinformation and abuse to spread this abuse and the threats are just rampant online the police can't keep up with it all and it's become normalized that people are able to do this online but it filters through to real life which is the bit that is really scary like I've had interactions with people who are really angry um about at me about things that are complete lies.

5:25And that has come as a direct result of social media companies being very much unregulated, in my opinion, and being allowed to share so much stuff without any repercussions. And this is where the government has to step up. And it goes without saying, I'm sure, that you've received the same kind of abuse. And I think basically any woman I've spoken to who works in journalism, politics, activism, basically any woman who has a social media profile is subjected to this kind of abuse. And that's always been the case on social media. It's always been the case. Yeah, I've experienced a lot of online abuse, mainly because I investigate a prickly world of kind of disinformation and conspiracy theories and trolling and algorithms and everything else.

6:06I mean, I've always noticed how gendered it is. It's often about my age as well. And it'll be really like abusive stuff, sometimes threatening, you know, rape threats, that kind of thing. what I think though has really struck me and it struck me when I was looking at the post targeting Hannah Spencer is how there was this period of time in like 2021 2022 where it felt like everyone was kind of turning around and saying this isn't okay actually and then it felt like and I think it's a combination of the social media companies changing their approach to this harmful but legal type content like borderline content but also then the rise of AI technology and the impact is like I don't post on x anymore like I basically don't ever post on x just because I'll get so much abuse and I won't reach anyone who I want to get in touch with me anyways I obviously investigate x all the time but I just don't feel inclined to post there because it's not a positive experience I mean I don't know how how this connects to you Matt because you get loads of online abuse yeah well I mean it's different if you're a man like obviously I've investigated people who have online armies of trolls at their command so you know when I investigated Andrew Tate and stuff I got they call me the DNG which stands for dork nerd geek which is like no no Yeah, exactly.

7:14It's no way near as bad as a rape threat or anything like that. If I was a woman investigating an entertainer, I think we can all imagine how bad it is. And women who investigated him have had it much worse. But I've had death threats. And the thing is, there's often discord. There will be like discords and chat groups where people are like planning posts about you, about you, Marianna Spring, as you. So like that's what's so disconcerting about it is like people are saying like let's repost this picture let's let's abuse her in this way and yes it's like coordinated in its nature exactly and i've also seen this in the fact that it's my fiance often that gets the abuse when i do a story which is mad because it's like she's not responsible for what you investigate or do no not at all obviously yeah and i don't have it that people in my life are really targeted in the same way exactly so i mean a quick side on that basically there was when I investigated Logan Paul for the BBC, him and Andrew Tate, there was a kind of a de facto alliance between their supporters and going after me.

8:14And Andrew Tate began to promote meme coins making fun of me. So like one of them was the Dork Nerd Geek coin. One was called Disgraced News Gatherer. One was called Matt Shea is a F A star star OT. One was called Take My wife tate parentheses cuck and i had a picture of my fiance taken from instagram like on this coin oh that's so gross how did she feel about it she just finds it funny and ridiculous because she's not really that online and you do kind of have to see it that way right like you have to sort of view it as a tactic in a way that these this world works yeah the kind of person who's like stuck in their basement like spending their time like writing a meme making meme because it's like that person is not living a happy life so i i empathize with them in a way but that in total by the way that the market cap the trading volume of meme coins making fun of me was two million dollars at one point this abuse is profitable so if you can generate engagement from abusing someone online a lot of these accounts will also have cryptocurrencies that they're shilling as well they'll have other ways of making money through engagement farming through clip farming so arguably especially on x hate and abuse are profitable yeah i think that's why it's worth highlighting image abuse here because I always find that like posts that have women shared in some kind of derogatory way maybe it's just a picture of a woman or maybe it's a picture that's been edited or doctored or AI generated will just perform so well like they do so well so much better than if they just wrote something or if it didn't have an image and I think that's where we kind of get on to grok and some of the new methods that can be used to generate images or doctor images that escalate the abuse for women and also escalate the level of engagement that accounts can get and benefit from doing this kind of thing.

9:58Yeah, because if you go on X now, X's LLM, Grok is integrated into X. If you go on X now, it's filled with Grok being asked to put women in bikinis, put them in sexual positions. And that triggered this whole outrage earlier this year when everyone was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on. Not just women as well, like kids were being targeted. So 3 million sexualized images between late December 25 and early January 2026 with about 23 ,000 of those images targeting children. This is generating a lot of heat for X and Grok. This is Grok's, what it calls, its so-called spicy mode. The European Commission is investigating X under the Digital Services Act.

10:35If that succeeds, they may have to pay huge fines. Ofcom is investigating here in the UK. And Grok has now had to make some changes, right, hasn't it, in light of pressure being put on X by different governments? Yeah, well, Keir Starmer did actually try and do something about this. He pressured X to stop doing this. And shortly afterwards, X announced... Basically to like put guardrails into the AI kind of thing. Yeah, and X announced that it had restricted rocks so it could no longer generate sexualized images of people. It turns out governments can ask big tech to do things if they actually try.

11:09Now, as usual, France and Australia, for some reason, have no problem stopping this kind of stuff. It's easy for them to do this. So they have criminalized the creation of non-consensual sexual deepfakes. They just did that instantly. And that brings us to another story that has been making headlines recently in relation to this issue of how different countries deal with AI-generated images of women, sexualized images, deepfake pornography, because there's been this big case in Germany. So there's a presenter in Germany, TV personality. Her name's Killeen Fernandez. And she's for a while spoken very vocally about the dangers of deep fakes, deep fake pornography, AI generated image abuse.

11:50She did a documentary a couple of years ago where she was trying to sort of figure out why people generate this kind of stuff because she's been subjected to it. And that in and of itself was already shocking and people were paying quite a lot of attention to it. But then there was this like wild twist. Dark twist. that it turns out that she alleges her own husband, now ex-husband, but her own husband was the person that was sharing some of this content and admitted to sharing some of this deepfake content generating it of her. Unclear exactly what kind of content he was sharing. Like, was it entirely AI generated?

12:25Was it pornography that had been doctored in some way? Was it accounts that were purporting to belong to her and so on and so forth? Obviously, the impact is exactly the same. worth saying from the get-go that he has now outright denied those allegations. His lawyers say that he has not distributed or created any kind of deep fake imagery, pornography, including of his ex-wife. But it's triggered this whole conversation about what the laws criminalise or allow and don't allow in Germany, especially because Colleen actually reported this in Spain, where she'd been living for a period of time, because she said that the laws there were much more effective at dealing with it than those in Germany.

13:00You know what's interesting about all these countries that do manage to effectively create legislation to ban things like this quickly is that there's no complaints about free speech as a result. It's not as though magically free speech disappears and everyone says, oh, no, we really miss this aspect of social media. They do it and the problem is solved instantly. So I think people are right to question why we can't have the same legislation in the UK or the US. Why is it so difficult? Why are governments so apparently ineffective at creating the most basic legislation to protect children and women from this kind of abuse?

13:34I think that one of the difficulties that politicians often cite or lawmakers cite is saying, well, hang on a second. Are we holding the social media companies accountable? Are we holding the individuals who carry this out accountable? And then you've got that whole kind of obfuscation of, and this is the difficult thing with AI fakes in general and with posts, but with AI fakes particularly. like where have they actually come from how do we prove that someone originated something you can generally prove that they distribute it but then they can also delete stuff remove things they can use anonymous accounts they're all kinds of methods that allow you to hide who you are essentially and lots of this case is relying on you know the testimony of which takes a lot by the way to come out come to come forwards and say by the way this happened to me and this was you know i'm alleging it's my ex-husband and that sort of thing it's like even the fact that he's outright denying it And all of that kind of stuff, it becomes this whole debacle and drama and what's going to happen next.

14:26So it's a really difficult thing to speak out about in general. I think it's a really important point you make about freedom of expression, because that is one of the kind of key counter arguments when it comes to regulating social media and AI and everything else. And often missing from that conversation is the impact that this kind of abuse has on women's own freedom of expression, because it has a chilling effect. If you feel like you're going to be targeted by this stuff, you don't go into public life. You don't post on social media. And that actually brings us all the way back to Hannah Spencer, because this was something she spoke about, the impact it can have on women deciding to go into public life or not.

15:00My experience of abuse on social media actually happened before I was elected. And to be honest, it was a big part of being a local councillor, unfortunately, too. I don't think there's any public role now where you're not subject to that level of hatred and abuse. and it's difficult for me to know how much of it to talk about one because it's very upsetting if I'm honest and two because I'm aware that for as much as I spend my time trying to encourage other women or people from marginalised backgrounds to get into politics why would anyone consider it when they know how bad things are online in terms of abuse and threats and dangers to personal safety this is one of the main reasons why so many people especially women won't consider putting themselves forward to stand for public office.

15:46So the competing rights in question here are the rights of, on the one hand, a woman to speak publicly without having her clothes removed from her against her consent in an AI image, her right to express herself without that happening, versus the right of some random internet troll to put her in a bikini, right? Now, which right is more important? Well, we as a society currently are siding with the rights of the troll who decides to sexualize women on the internet rather than the women who want to speak on the internet.

17:02So Paul McCartney was banned from Reddit. Reddit has claimed it was a technical bug that made him ban. They actually said no one would ban one of the Beatles. A moderator of the Paul McCartney subreddit has said, ask yourself, why would we ban the account of the man we're all passionate about? Moderators have no power over whose account is deleted from this website. Only admins do, which again has already been addressed, said roast beef disease. The moderator of the Paul McCartney subreddit. Paul McCartney technically isn't a boomer. I think he's in his mid-80s, so that would make him the silent generation, which is the pre-Boomer generation known for being frugal, having survived World War II, and very traditional and hardworking, which I actually think does describe him compared to the other Beatles.

17:45Another Boomer who's landed themselves in hot water. Also, the reason we're calling these people Boomers is because Boomer has basically just become code for someone who's older using the internet. Yeah, because this person, Brian Noem, Christy Noem's husband, is, I believe, in his late 50s, which would make him Generation X, technically. And Kristi Noem was part of Donald Trump's cabinet, so she's a big... Well, Kristi Noem was the head of Department of Homeland Security during the controversial ICE raids, was fired after spending$200 million on an advertisement which featured her riding a horse and wearing a cowboy hat.

18:20Now these videos, images have come out. Yeah, her husband, Brian Noem, it turns out that he's into this very specific fetish of having comically large breasts, So he would like put giant balloons under his shirt. By the way, do go and look up these pictures if you haven't seen them. Do, do. Yeah. And he's been outed because some of the people he was meant to pay to enlarge their own breasts to comically large sizes for his own gratification. He never paid them. And so they were angry. So they spoke to the Daily Mail. But this is obviously very embarrassing for the gnomes because, you know, this is, Christy Gnom herself has voted against, you know, trans people competing in sports and against LGBTQ issues.

19:01The reason that's an OK Boomer story is because it represents a kind of online illiteracy by which someone who's, you know, the spouse of a political figure would be openly kind of posting those images and sending those images to people without realizing that it's going to get leaked. And young people now increasingly are not posting stuff on social media as much as they were statistically because they are afraid of it affecting their future careers. But - And then there's also been this Kris Jenner stuff, hasn't there? She is - Well, but sorry, before we get to that, there's one more boomer I want to talk about, which is Jonathan the Tortoise.

19:37Again, not technically a boomer. Jonathan the Tortoise is 194 years old. So he's actually a Victorian. Yeah, he would be like gilded age Victorian. Okay, Victorian. Yeah. Our producer's saying that Jonathan the Tortoise would not have been a Victorian. I would argue his heyday, his youth, was during the reign of Queen Victoria. So I would still consider him a Victorian. He is technically a Georgian then, though. Late Georgian. I don't think that the 19th century has the same defined generations that we do. I don't think they've got their version of boomers and stuff. If you're cusp Georgian-Victorian, you're Georgian.

20:11I think being pernickety with me on this fact check is a little harsh because I don't think we're ever going to get to like the exact, like he's a tortoise, guys. He's been alive for about 200 years. He's a boomer. He's a boomer. But it is amazing that he's 194 years old. I know, I was just about to say how mad that is. I don't think he'd think very fondly of the internet after what's just happened to him. He probably is in MySpace, doesn't he? Or Bebo. Or like, what's the one called? Friends Reunited. Friends Reunited. Tortoises Reunited. um so basically he a viral post from someone who proclaimed to be his vet said that he had died um and it got two million views it turns out that this post was not an april fool's joke this was like an attempt to um shill a crypto project so this might sound getting more inventive yeah it It might sound niche, but I believe a large part of social media, especially X, is engagement farming in order to shill crypto tokens.

21:12And we should do a story about that at some point because that is literally like what a lot of the Internet is right now. Just get a viral post, use it to shill crypto. The vet, the people behind Jonathan the Tortoise, people who take care of Jonathan the Tortoise, have released a statement saying that despite being blind from cataracts and having lost his sense of smell, Jonathan remains hale and hearty with a strong appetite for bananas and a healthy libido because he tried to mate with two of the younger tortoises who also reside on the governor's property. So not only is he not dead, but he's shagging.

21:41They felt the need to say. Mating, sorry. When animals do it, it's mating. They did release a proof of life of Jonathan with an iPad with Today's News next to him. It's not that convincing. Like he looks worse for wear, Although I'm not a tortoisologist. I think if you're 194, you've probably been looking worse for wear for at least 50 years. But he's actively mating, so I don't know. Or do you think that's more of a sugar daddy situation with other tortoises? Yeah, or maybe he's going to get cancelled. See, this is the thing. No one's talking about this aspect of the story is why is he mating with younger tortoises?

22:19Why are we holding him up to such a high standard when he's basically the Leonardo DiCaprio of the tortoise world? Yeah, well, exactly. But it's not been a bad week for all boomers. There's one boomer who's had a good week on the internet, and that is Kris Jenner. I feel like she is almost like the face of boomerism in some ways. And yeah, she's had a great week because in China, users on Red Note, which is one of the really popular platforms there, have been changing their profile pictures to be Kris Jenner because they think it brings them good luck. Yeah, that's really interesting. And it's been on Weibo as well, hasn't it?

22:49So this is kind of a Chinese Gen Z thing to change your profile picture to Kris Jenner to bring fortune and abundance, good luck and wealth. I mean, she's very memeable. She has been for a long time. But also she represents this kind of Chinese ideal of the successful matriarch who's brought wealth to her family, right? Yeah, true. But then she's also super American, which makes it kind of interesting. The other symbol of wealth for Chinese culture is the koi carp. Oh, yeah. Maybe they think she looks like a koi carp because she does have like the lip color. Yeah, she kind of does. Did you see the picture of Kris Jenner where she looks so young?

23:24Yeah, yeah, yeah. And people are saying we've now entered into the era of plastic surgery where it is truly undetectable. She received so much praise for whatever she had done. Yeah, basically. People were like, wow, what has happened here? She looks so young. But then it raised all sorts of questions about aging. And in the age of filters and AI and everything else, is there now so much pressure in real life to look a certain way? And you're so heavily criticized if how you look in your photos online doesn't actually match up with what you look like in real life. even if you're in your 60s or 70s or 80s, and it would be completely feasible that you would have wrinkles like Jonathan.

24:01Who, by the way, just... He hasn't had a face. He hasn't had any work done. Not that we know of. No, not that we know of. But just on boomers and the internet, oftentimes boomers criticize younger people for their use of social media. Back in our day, we used to have events in the real world. But they're kind of the ones using it the most problematically. they're the ones believing all the conspiracy theories on Facebook they're the ones taking pictures constantly like come on how much how many times your parents have to take a picture every time you go out you know it's constant isn't it but what I would say as well about boomers and the internet and that term boomer understandably has some negative connotations people don't always love it but actually I love that boomers love the internet in fact they make some of the best content some of the stuff that pops up on my tiktok of like someone's random you know parent or grandparent who's like posting stuff from their iPad with some little montage.

24:51Great, love it. But the issue is, is that because actually social media is just so widespread, most age groups now use it. And there's loads of research that points towards the fact that actually, while younger people can be duped by AI, conspiracy theories and so on, older people can be particularly vulnerable to this stuff because they just didn't grow up with that kind of like level of social media literacy that we are expected to have when we're under the age of say 30 or whatever. But there's a bit of a generational horseshoe with social media as well. because once you mean to approach your 80s, you magically seem to become good at social media all of a sudden like Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders.

25:22Also, I guess the teams behind these people work out that actually they can play on the fact that that person is older and on social media. It's seen as quite endearing or funny or however you want to frame it. And Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders' teams have certainly leaned into that. Joe Biden didn't have quite as much luck with it, if we're honest with ourselves. But it's like I saw this TikTok the other day about like chic age groups. And so it was saying how like being any age from about 70 to 100, but particularly early 90s are especially chic. And I feel like for boomers on social media, yeah, the older you get, the less boomerish you become.

25:53So maybe that's why Jonathan is actually just chic. Now, it's worth saying I get quite a lot of DMs about the podcast, as do you. And we get lots of messages in, which we love. Keep getting in touch with us, whether it's positive or not. And one of the less positive messages we've had is from Ian, who basically said, actually, I don't really like the way you used boomer when we're talking about phantom trends and people thinking stuff had started or been fueled by what's going on on social media when it wasn't necessarily quite so straightforward. Ian is not a boomer, he tells us. He's actually Gen X.

26:23But I think it's interesting because - But he was offended by the term boomer. Term boomer, yeah. But I think that's because people have come to think of boomer as taking the mick. But it's actually just one of those words, in the same way that there's negative connotations about millennials, about Gen Z, about OK Boomer has just become this sort of meme. You can use it too, Ian. You can use it too. Because it doesn't apply to you. You're Gen X by your own ambition. I think it's even better when boomers use OK Boomer. Yeah. That's like top tier internet. I'm a millennial. I'm the most hated age group.