How the Internet has failed Women and Children
~ By Nivedita Sinha
Tigger Warning: This blog discusses themes of Sexual Harassment and Child Sexual Abuse
Picking up from where we left off last week, women and children are victims of a wide variety of cyber-crime, and the numbers are unfortunately on the rise, because of the pandemic that has contributed to people spending more of their time on the internet.
Cybercrime and Sexual Harassment are undeniably linked and may occur in the form of unwanted sexual advances, threats of physical or sexual violence, hate speech [words that specifically attack the identity, gender, or sexuality of an individual], or inappropriate, sexually explicit messages or texts. But are Internet Algorithms inherently sexist? Why is it that a woman or a child who is merely existing online is a potential victim of online sexual abuse and harassment? Where did we go wrong?
This is where Algorithmic Bias – a relatively new Internet phenomenon enters the picture. Algorithmic Bias refers to a series of systematic and repeatable errors that can result in unfair outcomes, especially those that give one arbitrary group of users a privilege over the others. Several of the Big Tech companies and Social Media Giants have been accused of enabling Pedophilia, owing to their Algorithmic Bias. In this recent article, The New York Times reported YouTube resurfacing videos of partially clothed children on people’s Recommended Homepages. The reason these terrifying events keep happening is because Algorithms are responsible for pushing content that is popular, or viewed multiple times by a certain demographic. The algorithm is merely doing its job, unknowingly enabling pedophilia in the process. AI is not designed with ethics and moral compasses; it is designed to send out videos to as many people as possible and to ruthlessly increase ad revenue.
In Josie Young’s Ted Talk, “Why we need to design Feminist AI”, she talks about how AI bots like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Amazon’s Alexa are incapable of responding to sexual harassment, insults based on gender and sexuality and misogynist comments. They simply responded by “thanking the user for their feedback”, evading the comment, “blushing flirtatiously”, or some other variation of a sarcastic quirky comment. Surely, Bots can be trained to recognize Hate Speech and recognize Sexual Harassment, when they are capable of far more complicated tasks and demands. This could be a reflection of the Technology Industry that is known for its few opportunities for women, and domination of men in the big ranks.
Alexa has since been trained to go into “disengage mode” when faced with sexual harassment, but as Josie Young says, “The response should be - That sounds like Sexual Harassment to me. Instead of disengaging completely.”
Furthermore, over the last couple of years, with the emergence of Tik Tok and other similar applications, which has a significant user demographic of minors, it is easier for pedophiles and abusers to come in contact with children. While the app requires you to be thirteen to sign up, that is not always the case, because minors as young as six or seven have accounts. There is no screening process to ensure that children are not creating accounts. Instagram’s new Reels feature functions in the same way. These minors are exposed to sexually explicit content, they may be potential victims of grooming, sexual abuse, even sex trafficking. In addition to all of this, Tik Tok has been known to be a breeding ground for pedophiles because it allows you to like, share and comment on content, uploaded by minors more often than not, and there is no security check or direct repercussions for grooming or talking to minors on the app. When minors upload content on Tik Tok, it is automatically pushed and recommended on For You pages and Explore Pages, functioning the same way the YouTube algorithm does. Some Tik Tok Trends prove to be even more harmful because they romanticize films like Lolita which depicts a grown man being in love with a young girl. Other Tik Tok Trends that may have real-world effects and are extremely dangerous and unhealthy is the romanticization of abusers and serial killers and extending sympathy and warmth towards them.
The Internet has failed its women and children. Artificial Intelligence, time and time again has only reduced our faith in technology and has only made women and children fear for their safety. It is possible to use Artificial Intelligence that is optimized for women and user-friendly, especially considering that over half of the users of the Internet are women and children.
Sources:
http://www.futuredata.io.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/classes/cs345s/handouts/kitchin.pdf