Tackling online misogyny in political campaigns: Promise and limitations of artificial intelligence

ABSTRACT

Studies on the resurgence of right-wing regimes in the Global South have lately offered more evidence for how misogynistic attacks against dissenting voices constitute important elements of populist rhetoric online. A significant recent trend is the active incorporation of gendered narratives within digital influence and disinformation strategies aimed at securing political gains for sponsoring interest groups. Based on the case of online misogyny in Brazil under Bolsonaro, this article probes the promise and limitations of technological solutions, touted especially in the latest wave of excitement around artificial intelligence, in addressing emerging forms of gendered speech. It suggests that a far-reaching approach to misogynistic political campaigns requires that nuanced message-level intervention in terms of community-centric artificial intelligence-assisted moderation systems should be combined with measures to disrupt online and offline networks that right-wing regimes have raised to spread disinformation and extreme speech.

KEYWORDS:

• Artificial intelligence
• content moderation
• misogyny
• disinformation
• Brazil

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(S).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BIDT) and European Research Council (Grant agreement number: 957442).

Notes on contributors

Sahana Udupa

Sahana Udupa is professor of media anthropology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (University of Munich, Germany), author of Making News in Global India (Cambridge University Press), Digital Unsettling: Decoloniality and Dispossession in the Age of Social Media (New York University Press, with E.G. Dattatreyan), and co-editor of Digital Hate: The Global Conjuncture of Extreme Speech (Indiana University Press) and Media as Politics in South Asia (Routledge).

Luise Koch

Luise Koch is a doctoral candidate in global health at the School of Social Sciences and Technology, Technical University of Munich, Germany. Her research interests include online misogyny, gender and global health, and mixed methods.