Margaret E Ward: Technology’s war on women — the new coercive control and confinement
In March, Willow Esteve (pictured), a young woman working in retail in Cork city centre, was approached by spectacle-wearing Vladyslav Morhulets, a software development student at MTU and content creator. His intention was to “prank” her at the checkout and film it.
She thought this only happened in movies. No matter how she changed her routine, she kept seeing him. She thought she was crazy until she found his bank card outside her home.
It was not instinct or familiarity that led him to her locations in Cork. It was a magnetic tracker, no bigger than a coin, hidden inside the tailpipe of her car. Gardaí found two tracking devices in his house plus a tracker app on his phone containing the location of the victim’s home and journeys she’d taken.
She had been carrying her own surveillance everywhere she went, unknowingly broadcasting her location. Her “crime” and the possible reason for the illegal surveillance: breaking up with a boyfriend of 18 months.
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Technological stalking like this is not an isolated case. West Cork Beacon reports 15 cases in the past year where women fleeing violent or controlling relationships have been tracked through devices attached to their cars, in power banks, their children’s toys and in their handbags.
Across Ireland and around the world, technology has quickly become one of the most powerful and insidious tools of control, harassment and intimidation wielded against women and girls both online and in person. It is the new face of coercive confinement and control: mostly invisible, hard to track and devastatingly effective in making women’s lives miserable.
Three recent scandals — involving x’s Grok, Meta’s Ray-Bans and Russian-based Telegram — show some technology companies’ offerings are greatly escalating threats to women and girls’ safety and mental health.
AI chatbot Grok, which is integrated into X, can edit and generate images directly on the social media platform. Last December, after Elon Musk announced this new functionality thousands of non-consensual sexual deepfakes, overwhelmingly targeting women and girls, quickly followed.
Grok users produced an estimated three million sexualised images largely of women and 23,000 of children, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Each of these images is of a real woman or girl who has been “undressed” and put into sexualised images created and distributed without their consent.
Many women who dare to be in the public eye — celebrities, journalists, politicians — are regular victims of deepfakes. They have no control of the image, no say in whether it’s shared or in how long it exists online or elsewhere.
“While the use of AI technology, such as Grok, for gendered abuse is new, the male supremacist ideology, sexual entitlement and dynamics of control that underpin this widespread sexual harassment campaign are not,” said the civil rights group Southern Poverty Law Centre.
"The perpetrators weaponise these tools to target and silence women online. Social media platforms are enabling the subjugation and humiliation of women by these extremists."
The second technology is more in your face, whether you’ll know it or not. Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses have cameras embedded in standard Ray-Ban frames that allows users to take photos and videos, listen to audio, and use AI hands-free. When recording, a light comes on showing the recording is active.
In March, Willow Esteve, a young woman working in retail in Cork city centre, was approached by spectacle-wearing Vladyslav Morhulets, a software development student at MTU and content creator. His intention was to “prank” her at the checkout and film it.
He later uploaded the interaction to his accounts on both Instagram and TikTok, where he has a large following. Esteve had no idea until friends informed her the next day. She says there was no light and she was not aware she was being filmed.
Esteve asked the social media companies to remove the video. Meta declined while TikTok deleted the video along with others from the influencer’s account that violated its policies.
This new technology can bring harassment and bullying directly to women and girls’ doorsteps too. Using Meta's Ray-Bans, it’s possible to identify a stranger's full name, home address and personal details within approximately one minute simply by looking at them on the street.
Inside the home, the tech story is not much better for women. Following the conviction of Dominique Pelicot and 50 other men for raping his drugged wife Gisele, a follow-up CNN investigation revealed an online rape academy with 62 million views in February this year alone.
On various sites, including Telegram, groups of men were instructing one another on how to drug and rape their partners and film it. Some of the men sold the sleep drugs while others charged for livestreams of them raping their wives.
Technology-facilitated gender-based violence is a growing problem according to the United Nation’s Population Fund and it takes many forms, including sextortion image-based abuse, doxing; cyberbullying; online gender and sexual harassment; cyberstalking; online grooming for sexual assault; hacking; hate speech; online impersonation; and using technology to locate survivors of abuse to inflict further violence, among many others.
“It carries significant health, safety, political and economic consequences for women and girls, for their families and communities, and for society as a whole. As women and girls self-censor to prevent technology-facilitated gender-based violence, their voices are silenced and democracies suffer.”
Violence against women and girls is a profitable industry, enabled by tech tools, bad actors and light touch regulation.
Since the 1990s, there have been warnings about rising technofascism in Silicon Valley. Technofascism is characterised by the concentration of power among a few tech leaders, surveillance, and the rise of right-wing digital authoritarianism.
The intersection of technology and extreme ideology can perpetuate and amplify existing patriarchal structures and gendered violence.
“While presented as milestones in innovation and progress, these technological transformations have also introduced mechanisms of control, forms of organisation, and ideological patterns that bear striking resemblances to historical fascist phenomena,” argues academic Mark Coeckelbergh of the University of Vienna in .
Many Silicon Valley bros happily share right-wing ideologies that reduce women to baby-maker, sex object or interfering shrew. Elon Musk is a pro-natalist who believes it’s his duty, because of his high IQ, to have as many children as possible with different women.
Zuckerberg’s Meta ended DEI programs last year and changed its platform policies to allow more discriminatory and harassing posts. He claimed that corporate culture had moved away from “masculine energy” and needed to reinstate it after getting “neutered”.
Palantir’s co-founders, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, openly discuss restricting women’s opportunities. Thiel wants to take away their right to vote while Karp brags about AI technology limiting women’s opportunities for work.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Regulators and governments have the power to restrict these technologies and fine bad actors. The big question is: why haven’t they?
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