Three quarters of women in journalism experienced online violence last year, UN Women data shows.
This won’t come as a surprise to many – the rise of AI has led to the escalation of online violence against women.
With generative AI tools like ChatGPT becoming mainstream, it is easier, and cheaper, than ever to produce much more believable abusive content.
Deepfakes, for example, can be distributed quicker by algorithms tuned to amplify hate, anger and division.
This, ultimately, maximizes the profits of Big Tech companies’, which are the largest and most influential technology companies in the world.
Pauline Renaud is lecturer in the Department of Journalism at City St George’s, University of London.
She was involved with the UN Women report in a quantitative capacity; she created the survey that was shared internationally to collect the data and analysed the results.
“When I was studying journalism, my classmates took a lot of behaviour that was unacceptable, you know, sexist behaviour, as ‘that’s just the way it is’. I think it’s important to not normalise this online violence or think it’s part of the job,” she said.
In the last five years, the percentage of women journalists and media workers who have experienced online violence in the course of their work jumped by 2% – from 73% in 2020 to 75% in 2025.
These acts of violence are technology-facilitated and are directed against women because they are women and/or affect women disproportionately.
Online harassment, image- and video-based abuse, and gendered hate speech delivered via information communications technologies, such as social media, are examples of online violence against women.
UN Women’s report surveyed 640 women from 119 countries, all of whom were working in the public sphere – with a focus on human rights defenders, activists and journalists.
The scale of the problem and the function of artificial intelligence technologies in its manifestations illustrated by the research is deeply concerning.
In fact, 24% of the women human rights defenders, activists, journalists and media workers who said they have experienced online violence in the course of their work said that they had experienced AI assisted online violence.
Renaud said: “It’s really concerning that with AI in particular, all the ways of attacking women have just been made easier, more sophisticated.
“All those new technologies are very much now used as weapons against women.”
This is strong evidence that AI technologies are playing a significant role in online violence directed at women working in these professions.
Renaud added: “It’s no use just trying to address it from a technological perspective or just from a law enforcement perspective or just a civil society perspective.”
An OpenAI spokesperson told The Independent: “Our safety systems are designed to block potentially harmful images that are uploaded to ChatGPT, and we analyse whether the AI-generated image violates our policies before we show the image to the user.
“We also combine automated systems and human review to identify and block harmful material.
“We very much want all stakeholders to come together and think about creating a system where people who have been targeted by online violence can report this and this can essentially be dealt with at different levels.”
Featured image credit: The Climate Reality Project via Unsplash
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