Self-reinforcing misogyny machine

Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos discussed the relationship between corporations and the political parties. Corporations used to be tightly bound to the GOP, partly because those politicians could be more easily bought. But now...

What corporations are now weighing is whether they want to deal with a stable party of adults with which they can negotiate or a bunch of mercurial self-interested opportunists who might blindside them at any given moment.

Michel Martin of NPR spoke with Charlotte Jee who wrote an article for the MIT Technology Review on what a feminist internet would look like. The on-air segment started with a clip of John Perry Barlow reading the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace of 1996.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force or station of birth.

Missing from the list is gender. The current internet is not safe for women. They receive an excessive portion of online abuse. Jee said that when a sexist man hears or reads something uncomfortable he is going to get her to shut up, perhaps through trolling campaigns. There is also algorithmic discrimination. A search for “schoolboy” returns innocuous results. A search for “schoolgirl” returns sexualized imagery. The bias in society contributes to a “self-reinforcing misogyny machine.” The misogyny is amplified because engagement is prioritized and trolls are engaged a lot. To get a feminist internet the individual needs more control over Big Tech, starting with privacy and security settings. This is beneficial for both men and women. An example is the fitness tracking company Strava. It allows tracking your running route. But for a woman this data could be used to stalk her. If the person being tracked is in the military the data could also be used to locate military bases. Failing to listen to women also hurts men. Another issue, according to Jee:

There's been this traditional debate around free speech, when in reality it's, like, well, whose free speech? Because you're protecting the free speech of men to abuse women, but what about those women's free speech that are being chased offline?

Women’s internet issues aren’t taken seriously because these tech companies

are founded by and run by relatively privileged men who really can't imagine what it's like to be on the receiving end of this. ... If they wanted to, they could decide that harassment is not something they're willing to tolerate because, you know, they are able to work together on issues like terrorism, child sexual abuse. And right now, it feels like they've decided that women being harassed and receiving rape threats - that kind of thing - is just, like, a cost of doing business that they're willing to pay. When it comes to threats to women's well-being, direct threats, I really do think that they can and should be doing a lot more about that.

As Republicans have been proposing and passing voter restriction laws some of them have been talking about wanting “quality” voters, those who are “virtuous” and “well informed.” Only those people should vote. Steven Strauss, of USA Today’s Board of Contributors writing in an opinion piece in last Sunday’s Detroit Free Press, said go for it. And start with GOP voters. They are not well informed if they: Continue to believe the nasty guy won. Believe the January 6 Capitol attack was either by leftists in a “false flag” operation or was peaceful. Still believe President Obama was born in Kenya. Still deny COVID is real and refuse the vaccine. Get their information from Tucker Carlson on Fox News when the Fox lawyers say that one shouldn’t believe what Tucker Carlson says. Yeah, those sound like low quality, uninformed people who meet the GOP requirement of those who shouldn’t be allowed to vote.