The plot could easily have been from a Netflix dystopian thriller.

“The Russian Guy” approaches ordinary women and girls leading ordinary lives, one walking her child to school, another stocking supermarket shelves, and a young girl walking by.

“Hello. What’s your name? You look beautiful. Come with me.”

He has sex with them in his rental apartment. The entire encounter is captured on video through his Ray-Ban META smart glasses. He posts the videos on his private Telegram account and porn sites for paying followers, while shorter clips have gone viral on TikTok and Instagram. Rumors swirl that he is HIV positive. Evidence indicates that hundreds of women and young girls across Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa have fallen prey.

The spectrum of technology-facilitated gender-based violence has fanned out yet again into an even more grotesque form.

First, it was humans operating in the dark web. As the range of tech tools expanded, so did new ideas emerge on how to amplify violations against women and girls. Grok, the AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, enabled image-editing to create non-consensual sexualized images of women. With “the Russian Guy,” otherwise known as “Yaytseslav,” AI-powered wearables in the form of eyewear with hidden cameras have raised the stakes. His prey were unaware that the blinking light at the corner of the frames was a recording camera paired to a smartphone.

The gender AI divide – inequalities between women and men related to access, use, development, and representation in AI technologies – one that is wider for less tech-savvy women, implies that the room for AI-amplified violations can only expand.

Yaytseslav’s case is also a cautionary tale on AI ethics and regulation. Despite public outrage in Ghana and Kenya and calls for his arrest, he remains active, posting content on social media.

The Cyber Security Authority in Ghana invoked Section 67 of the Cybersecurity Act, which criminalizes the non-consensual recording, publication, or distribution of intimate images or videos. By then, he had travelled to Kenya, where the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act 2018 provides similar grounds.

Legislation is of little value, however, when perpetrators can move freely between jurisdictions. The scale of Yaytseslav’s actions might have been reduced if comprehensive, regional and/or international AI regulatory frameworks had been in place to serve as a deterrent.

That the events are presently unfolding in the Silicon Savannah in Kenya, a country that is one of Africa’s frontier tech nations and one of the region’s top AI policymakers, is alarming.

Regulation must cover AI-amplified gendered violence, exclusion, exploitation and misogyny, beyond the often-touted economic benefits. Rather than a patchwork of dispersed national laws, standards must be harmonized across the region. They must be enforced by a powerful regulator able to stand up to the Global North’s big tech firms on all facets of technology.

Photo: Ground Pictures and People Images composition

Recent headlines I read run from the latest attempts by Donald Trump to own Greenland to Taylor Swift becoming the second–youngest ever inductee to the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

There doesn’t seem to be a connection, but there is – digital technology.

Whether it’s the semi-conductors and modern military planes that need critical minerals or the algorithms in streaming services that can magnify popularity, the influence of digital technology permeates all aspects of our life far beyond what most people realise.

This was the topic of WACC Europe’s most recent online discussion, led by network member and AI expert Erin Green. The event highlighted just how important WACC’s resources on digital justice are to raise awareness of informed use and identify issues requiring advocacy.

But the discussion also raised the question of what would happen if journalists themselves took a digital justice lens to the news stories they are reporting and highlighted this red thread running through them.

So often, the development and use of digital technology come under the “Tech” section of the news.  Here, even if you are reading the section religiously, you can easily miss the enormity of digital’s impact.

The Greenland saga is not only about mineral extraction but surveillance technology. It is also connected to the vital importance that tech spending on AI developments has for US economic growth – adding to the U.S. government’s insistence on unregulated development even over safety concerns.

A salacious story of Prince Harry taking Associated Newspapers to court may garner little sympathy for the combatants, but it should remind us of all the digital tools that make it possible now to listen in, scrape data, and track movements of even the least of us.

Water scarcity? It’s a climate change story or a private industry scandal and, increasingly, an artificial intelligence dilemma. Will AI identify environmental solutions before the massive data centres being built to increase its power further drain communities dry?

More apparent digital connections can be seen in other stories, from local impact – an AI-generated image of a damaged railway bridge in northern England posted on social media that caused rail companies to cancel trains – to international horror when Internet shutdowns hide violent repression.

There is of course other news related to digital technology that is positive, from health breakthroughs to exposure of human rights abuse that leads to justice. But digital justice issues are the red thread running through our news and lives – making this the common focal point for informed use and advocacy.

Communication rights campaigners know much of this already. The danger is that we think this is obvious to everyone else.

This is why we need to make sure people take the first step and learn about the connected, deeper issues of our digital lives. Part of the value of WACC’s Just Digital course is that it does exactly that – it highlights the many justice issues linked to the digital ecosystem driving our world today.

Let’s ensure that the red threads of digital justice are visible in our families, schools, workplaces, community organizations, media, and more. When realities are exposed, steps towards justice can finally take place.

Photos: Hadrian/Shutterstock, Toeizuza Thailand/Shutterstock, Tada Images/Shutterstock

Photo: Digital justice, Just Digital, WACC Europe, digital technologies, media

Both at the WSIS+20 High-Level Meeting in July in Geneva and in the negotiations involved in drafting the outcome document in the months since, WACC and its partners have emphasized the centrality of human rights in all aspects, and by all actors, of the Information Society.

With that in mind, there are some elements in the last published version of the draft document that civil society coalitions have welcomed.

The Global Digital Rights Coalition (GDRC), in their November 20 statement on Revision 1 WSIS+20, welcomed elements of the document which reaffirm “the value and principles of multistakeholder engagement,” anchor the WSIS in international human rights law and UN systems, uphold “the independence and diversity of media,” and clarify “the obligation of States and the responsibilities of the private sector to uphold human rights in all aspects of the governance of digital technologies.”

Just as clearly, though, much needs to be strengthened for a clear people-centric path forward. The GDRC continues to call for strengthened language and explicit references that would, among other things:

• Prohibit the use of digital technologies fundamentally incompatible with human rights.
• Emphasize the duty of the private sector to conduct human rights due diligence on their products.
• Restore language on the urgent need to counter and address all forms of violence.
• Strengthen references to information and democratic processes by referring explicitly to social media and AI-generated or manipulated content.
• Respect and protect human rights throughout the life cycle of AI systems.

Will the final approved document be strengthened or weakened in the end? Will adherence to human rights – not to mention environmental safeguards – be enshrined in the text and affirmed by member states, or will economic interests and political control win the arguments?

In either case, all of us in civil society will need to be prepared for the implementation of both the 2024 Global Digital Compact and the outcomes of WSIS+20. With privately driven technological advances far outstripping the ability of states to control, intense engagement is required of civil society in pressing for accountability, transparency, human rights, and economic and environmental justice.

In their response to the Zero Draft in October, the Global Digital Justice Forum stated:

“An optimistic approach can still be pragmatic but only if attentive to the unease and aspirations of those in the margins; those hopeful of a better digital tomorrow. This must first honestly acknowledge that a profit-centric technological revolution has failed to open up pathways for a people-led, inclusive, and development-oriented information society. This mainstream digital paradigm must be replaced by an alternative public technological paradigm that distributes the innovation dividends of the data and AI revolution.”

If we truly want a people-centred, inclusive, and development-oriented information society, we will need all our voices and actions to ensure it happens.

Photo: ITU/Pierre Albouy, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Anxieties about a takeover of humanity by automation, machines, and technology are not new. In the Western world, the fears date back to the 1800s when textile automation fueled protests against job loss. Disquiet about AI first emerged three quarters of a century ago when pioneers warned of its potential to mimic and replace human labour.  Fears of imminent job loss bubbled to the surface, particularly in sectors characterized by repetitive tasks.

With the digital revolution, the fears have gone mainstream and global. Today, it is not only manual jobs that are replaceable but also those requiring empathy and cognitive capacities – such as mental health therapy and scientific research. The informal sector employing the majority of global south populations is at risk as some jobs become formalized, earnings are eroded, and power is concentrated in platforms and governments.

Global big tech founders have weighed in on AI’s impact on jobs, society, and the future of innovation. Humans will no longer be needed for most things because AI will readily perform tasks requiring specialized human skills (Bill Gates). Probably none of us will have a job (Elon Musk). Software engineers will do much more for a while and then at some point, fewer will be needed (OpenAI’s Sam Altman).

AI displacement of human labour brings a risk of deepening power and economic inequalities across and within nations. Research on the platform economy or “gig work” finds an algorithmic allocation of jobs that exacerbates gender inequalities.

Such risks are not immediately evident to those at the forefront of AI regulation, whose attention is often focused on ethics. To this point, a spokesperson from the EU at a side event at the recent UN Commission on the Status of Women admits that the gender dimensions were overlooked in the protracted process to regulate online work.

History suggests that societal adaptation naturally follows technological advancement. Present-day AI however seems to be more threatening due the sheer rapidity of change. Will there come a time when AI will follow its own distinctive logic unconstrained by human and societal values? On this point, the jury is still out.

Image: Shutterstock AI

Human rights activists are concerned that such data can be used to discriminate against migrants, refugees, and on racial grounds.

The “Report of the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance” (United Nations, November 2020) is categorical:

“Governments and UN agencies are developing and using emerging digital technologies in ways that are uniquely experimental, dangerous, and discriminatory in the border and immigration enforcement context. By so doing, they are subjecting refugees, migrants, stateless persons and others to human rights violations, and extracting large quantities of data from them on exploitative terms that strip these groups of fundamental human agency and dignity.”

The focus of the report is the prevalence of digital technologies in immigration and border enforcement. Some commentators are referring to the rise of “digital borders” – meaning those whose infrastructure and processes increasingly rely on machine learning, automated algorithmic decision-making systems, predictive analytics and related digital technologies.

The UN Special Rapporteur, Tendayi Achiume, was interviewed by Katy Fallon in “UN warns of impact of smart borders on refugees: ‘Data collection isn’t apolitical’” (The Guardian, 11 November 2020). She said, “One of the key messages of the report is that we have to be paying very close attention to the disparate impact of this technology and not just assuming that because it’s technology, it’s going to be fair or be neutral or objective in some way.”

The article noted that Covid-19 has accelerated “biosurveillance” – tracking people’s movements and health. Citing the “Covi-Pass”, a health passport developed by Mastercard and Gavi, a private-public health alliance, being tried out in several African countries, the UN Report criticised the potential impact of such passports on freedom of movement especially for refugees.

In response, the Special Rapporteur has proposed a structural and intersectional human rights law approach to the design and use of emerging digital technologies. It emphasises the scope of legally prohibited racial discrimination in their design and use; current obligations to prevent and combat racial discrimination; and obligations to provide effective remedies for racial discrimination.

It’s clear that civil society groups need to monitor the ways digital technologies are being applied in humanitarian crises and elsewhere in order to challenge discrimination and injustice.

Photo: Alexander Kirch/Shutterstock