Algorithms and Sexploitation

Reflections on this year’s 16 Days of Activism

A longer version of this essay appears in Bot Populi/Data Syn

Laurie Anderson exhibit at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC

DARVO: Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim and Offender. This is a familiar acronym to those of us who have worked to end gender-based violence. It’s how sexual harassers evade responsibility. It’s one element of how violent extremists recruit young boys as soldiers and young girls as sex slaves. And it’s baked into your search engines. As if dealing with real-world perverts and sociopaths weren’t enough, AI is being used to increase the efficiency with which predators find and groom our children.

I’ve spent the better part of my career working to end gender-based violence and human trafficking. In recent years I’ve also researched the ways in which the digital economy amplifies discrimination. And each year I’ve tracked the annual 16 Days of Activism to End Gender-Based Violence with the hope that, slowly, we were making progress.

The theme for 2025 was ending digital violence. Campaign efforts were wildly insufficient to the task.

Misogyny by Design

Does anyone believe we need to do more to ‘raise awareness’ of the extent of online violence, when every major platform is now cramming violence into our eyeballs? Is a social media hashtag (#NoExcuse) even remotely likely to break the surface amid the sea of trolls?

All evidence indicates that those with the most power over online spaces are most likely to use those spaces to amplify technology-facilitated gender-based violence in all its manifestations, from amplifying non-consensual images to generating child pornography. Timid efforts to convince these actors to put on the brakes will not work. I wanted to write something for 16 Days about the neocolonialist structural violence inherent in the digital economy; the ways in which its very business model is premised on the extraction and appropriation of our most intimate data and in giving a very small handful of unimaginably wealthy men infinite power over how to use it.

I’d just interviewed a well-known LGBTQI+ activist, Jessica Stern, and was thinking about the AIDS crisis and the ACT UP movement of the late 1980s in the United States. Their symbol, a black and pink Silence = Death triangle, was ubiquitous and extremely effective — a meme that predated the attention economy and a reminder of the effectiveness of offline symbols that provide a shorthand way of understanding systems and structural violence.

Wanting to write about later uses of the Silence is Violence slogan, reader, I did not google it, having abandoned Google search precisely because its search engine amplifies content promoting gender-based violence. My search engine of choice is Duck Duck Go, with its commitment to minimize filter bias and therefore (I have hoped) also to reducing or at least neutralizing violent and misogynistic content in my feed. Yet a simple search of Silence is Violence resulted in no less than three pages of reactionary content, before even a single neutral or positive article appeared. Repeating the search on both Microsoft Edge and Google yielded more mixed results, with some neutral/positive articles mixed in with many critiques, possibly precisely because these other platforms were applying content filters for me, yet all platforms elevated a small handful of reactionary commentators on known right-wing blog sites and publications.

Further investigation revealed that apparently the entire fragile White social media influencer cadre was triggered by the use of the slogan during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests responding to the murder of George Floyd, and never let go. Yet there was so much other content- why did searches only lead to citations led to right-wing blogs and media outlets? Why was all the featured content essentially just gaslighting, and/or claiming that the real victims were straight white men?

Our search engines are systematically elevating content intended to disrupt our most effective campaigns.

The project of erasing legitimate voices to ensure that DARVO dominates is well underway. We were warned that this was happening. Safiya U. Noble’s 2018 Algorithms of Oppression called attention to the intentional, monetized elevation of racism and sexism via commercial search engines. Researcher Timnit Gebru was famously fired by Google in 2020 for pointing out that data sets used to train large language models (LLMs) were data scraping from the skewed racist, sexist metaverse of images Noble had exposed, and that training AI on such data sets would result in AI generating ever more racist and sexist content in response to a growing range of unrelated queries — the now infamous “stochastic parrots” hypothesis.

We’re not going to tame tech-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) if we overlook what Noble, Gebru and others were exposing: misogyny by design, with systems intentionally trained on violent and sexualized images of Black and Brown women and set up to further amplify, and ultimately generate, content that reified their investors’ white supremacist world views.

The Rise of the Groomer Elite

In writing this, I struggled with whether to use terms like ‘sociopath’ and ‘sadist’ to describe the men behind this. I believe these terms are accurate. In right-wing information ecosystems, algorithms are put at the disposal of men who, in real life, exploit women, have numerous children with multiple partners and ignore them, and immediately crank up DARVO when asked to account for their actions.

In 2024, Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov was indicted in France on charges of aiding and abetting child sexual abuse. Investigators determined that the platform’s failure to moderate and remove child sexual abuse material was intentional; this was exploitation by design. Durov, like much of the tech billionaire elite, has expressed a strong view that protections for civil liberties and free speech must encompass the right of individuals to amplify hate speech, calls for violence, sexual exploitation and abuse. With billions of dollars at their disposal to further this view, a miniscule handful of elites have ushered in groomer capitalism.

It’s not just an epiphenomenon. In Empire of AI, journalist Karen Hao details the massive investments that have been poured into the development of algorithmic inference (AI) tools. She notes that while the groomer elite have claimed that by scraping every known bit of data they would be able to solve humanity’s problems from climate change to preventing the next pandemic, in reality their imaginations seem to fail when confronted with actual problems that actual policy experts and advocates have been working to solve. Early AI investor Elon Musk famously claimed he would donate $6 billion to anyone who could solve world hunger, only to renege when the UN World Food Programme stepped forward with viable solutions that concerned real people had developed. And Musk’s DOGE literally erased the work of several decades to solve global poverty when, in destroying the US Agency for International Development (USAID), they purged all access to research on effective solutions to issues such as effective ways to reduce the spread of infectious diseases, improvement of educational outcomes, and even famine early warning systems. Hardly the work of altruists seeking to use their tools to help humanity.

As Hao notes, the evidence points heavily to this cadre’s overwhelming interest in monetizing and using their tools to generate an ever greater quantity of pornography. Let’s recall that when Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse was launched in late 2021, within weeks it had become a haven for stalkers seeking to groom young boys so they could sexually exploit them. Researchers have demonstrated this was predictable. Billionaires push a radical deregulation agenda under the guise they are protecting free speech. In reality they seek to protect their platforms from all laws, even as they fund right-wing political groups that ban books about penguin families and rainbow-colored unicorns from our children’s libraries. So, of course, crime abounds on their platforms while they systematically undermine the alternative content that might help us teach our children empathy and respect for others.

Role Models: Emperor Penguin and Chick

In the middle of this year’s 16 Days Campaign, the war between the groomer class and regulators surfaced as the EU levied a $140 million fine on Musk’s platform, X, for user deception. Musk quickly clapped back, with the Trump-led US administration at his back. The case has received far less attention than it merited given numerous events this past week calling for stronger regulation to end TFGBV.

The Trump/Musk nexus is emblematic of the use of public policy to enable rather than curtail exploitation. Prior to Musk’s acquisition, Twitter had famously banned Trump for using the platform to incite political violence. Musk’s X embraces violence, and welcomed him back. The Trump regime has been clear that regulation of the groomer class is not a policy option.

Earlier this year Trump pardoned Andrew Tate, a well-known sex trafficker who has systematically used his social media feeds not only to amplify violent, misogynist content but also to groom his followers. A relatively tame example of classic grooming content intended to isolate the target from loved ones and divert his loyalty and affection to the groomer himself was Tate’s recent post stating that “if you’re a straight man with a girlfriend in 2025, you’re gay.” I won’t provide further links here but they are easy enough to find if anyone is looking for more detail on the graphic and violent content that Tate regularly shares with his followers. The methodology, common to what warlords use to groom child soldiers and sex slaves, is to separate young targets entirely from their loved ones- families and communities- and transfer their allegiance over time to the sociopath who wants to control them.

In sum, in the epicenter of all our efforts to regulate and content moderate an end to TFGBV sit a very small handful of sadistic men, champions of violent pornography but quite happy to suppress speech when it calls attention to their own crimes. These men use their knowledge to ensure younger generations who are increasingly reliant on online spaces for communication and information receive a steady stream of gaslighting, misinformation and content intended to groom them to be the next generation of victims or perpetrators. And this includes taking aim at effective and simple slogans like Silence is Violence that might otherwise cut through the fog.

Resistance in an Age of Digital Colonialism

Violence is on the rise and it’s not the technology that’s at fault. The problem is the very small handful of elite men who control the means of digital production. As the researchers who first coined the term TFGBV state,

This is not a neutral distribution of power. These powerful actors are determining whose safety matters, whose harm is ignored, and who gets to shape the rules of the game. As those with the greatest power evade accountability, responsibility is pushed onto those with the least, such as civil society, parents, teachers, activists, and victim-survivors themselves.

So what must we do? In September 2025, an important day-long event focused on ending GBV. The event, titled Free Futures 2025, took place on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. Acclaimed journalist and tech justice advocate Maria Ressa was one of the featured speakers. Ressa emphasized, as she has elsewhere, that it’s time to stop trying to reform existing spaces and pivot our movements to demand a digital public square that is collectively created and governed, and insist on the investment to make it a reality. Bot Populi’s Feminist Digitality project surfaced important contributions toward this vision. And a few voices broke through among the usual suspects in events this past week. One UN event provided a spotlight to Argentine feminist activist Ana Correa, who is hacking Chat GPT with the OlivIA tool, directly challenging algorithmic bias from within.

Hacking is part of what we need to do. Developing alternative feminist digital resources is another part of the answer. And we need to continue creating feminist narratives online and offline; a femisphere of content to counter their manosphere. All of this will need investment and at least some will need government support. Not all governments need to submit to the groomer class and its digital colonization; small governments can band together to mobilize the investment needed for a genuinely cooperative digital ecosystem. Entire regions can create their own digital infrastructure that over the long run rejects re-colonization and creates meaningful investments, decent work, and helps ensure we raise the next generation of children safe from the global groomer elite.

We won’t end TFGBV until we end the sociopathy that is at its roots, and this is an achievable task, as indeed are all of humanity’s current problems. The answers have always lain in patient collective action by teams of committed people coming together, and where problems are transnational, uniting across borders. AI will not help us until we remove its overlords and reclaim control of the data these systems are permitted to utilize.

The few who make these decisions now cannot and will not help us in any way; they lack imagination or courage to do so. It’s we who can imagine a different future, and who must be brave enough to strive for it.