July 24, 2024 | The 19th*
Melanie Smith on rising racist and misogynistic online disinformation targeting Kamala Harris
Melanie Smith, Director of Research for ISD US, spoke to The 19th* about the rise in racist and misogynistic online disinformation targeting Vice President Kamala Harris after she announced that she would be seeking the Democratic nomination.
Melanie explained that research on online misogyny shows that gendered online attacks against women in politics have disproportionally targeted women of color, referencing ISD’s report ‘Public Figures, Public Range. Candidates abuse on social media‘ from 2020.
Additionally, content moderation by social media platforms has worsened since the 2020 presidential elections, with some tools and features for researchers being discontinued, leaving researchers to manually do a lot of their tracking. Melanie highlighted how these limitations in transparency and data access hinder researchers’ efforts to fully uncover and expose these evolving trends. As AI-generated content also becomes more accessible, sophisticated, and widespread, these challenges are intensifying, making it even harder to ensure the integrity and accountability of online information.
“We, right now, do not have the kind of counter infrastructure in place to detect every instance of a deep fake video or a manipulated audio,” she said.
Melanie then discussed how the increase in racist, misogynistic online disinformation targeting Kamala Harris fits within a broader intimidation agenda.
“They’re not trolling her just to troll her. There’s a broader effort at play that is connected to undermining women’s participation in democracy and women holding office,” she said. “There is this bigger agenda.”
“We are likely to see a period of throwing spaghetti at the wall in terms of testing different conspiracy theories about her, different disinformation narratives. […] And the people who have a vested interest in undermining her will seek to see what’s sticking with their audiences.”
Melanie was also featured in Vox speaking on this topic.
