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

One may ask why funding investments directed to efforts to end violence against women and girls (VAWG) seem not to be bearing fruit as intended. In almost 3 decades, the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women has disbursed USD 225 million to 670 projects aimed at ending VAWG in approximately two-thirds of the world’s countries.

The funding seems enormous, but a closer analysis reveals it to be less than 1% of the combined annual national budgets of 36 of the world’s largest economies. The funding investment is after all insignificant.

Violence against women has been accepted and even condoned throughout history in most societies. It has gained ground in once progressive nations with the alarming shift to right-wing politics and spreading anti-gender movements. Paradoxically, awareness has increased, new legislation has been enacted, and silence around VAWG has been broken in many parts of the world.

Yet efforts to end VAWG continue to swim against the tide, complicated by firmly entrenched repressive gender social norms, institutional barriers, fear on the part of survivors and their lack of economic autonomy from perpetrators. The one-in-three statistic of women experiencing violence has barely changed in the last few decades.

Technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) has added a new layer of harm to women and girls Internet users. Those from minority groups are more likely to be subjected to online hate. In Europe for example, black women are 84% more likely to receive abusive tweets than white women.

There is no shortage of ideas of what needs to change, from holistic institutional support systems to accountability of social media companies and cultural transformation.

Margaret Sentamu of Uganda Media Women’s Association, a WACC partner, urges unwavering commitment to advocacy. The struggle to end VAWG offline and online must be intersectional and multifaceted. It must seek a total transformation of culture to value the safety, dignity, respect, and rights of women and girls.

Photo: The 33rd edition of the annual 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence opening panel

Most people around the world, especially those in rural, poor and marginalized areas, experience the Internet largely through social media, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and other platforms. According to the Internet usage rate worldwide as of 2022, by gender and market maturity, from Statista, women make up a sizeable proportion of the networked population, nearly at par with men in wealthy nations to four out of ten Internet users in the poorest regions.

Juxtapose this fact with the unbounded misogyny thriving in online communities, unfettered by all measures to contain and eradicate it, and propelled by individuals such as the self-described misogynist Andrew Tate with his over 4.5 million followers on Twitter alone or  groups such as Homme Choc on Facebook where men bond over hatred of women. Almost nine out of ten girls and women Internet users know first-hand what it feels like: Targeted harassment and abuse, gendered disinformation, the non-consensual distribution of intimate images and the creation of deep fakes.

Safer Internet Day (SID) on February 7 was established to “raise awareness of emerging online issues and current concerns.” Online safety issues tend to more often than not, be gender-based, targeting girls, women, gender and sexual minorities disproportionately. This SID, do what you can to advance a misogyny-free Internet.

Get Involved

Visit the Safer Internet Day website to find ideas on how to advance a misogyny-free Internet.

Photo: Rana Hamid