In recent years, American politicians seem to be getting tougher about internet oversight. But it remains unclear whether Washington has the will to regulate big tech companies and the platforms they control. This week on "Democracy in Danger" we hear from Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat, and former Rep. Barbara Comstock, a Republican, live from the University of Virginia’s celebrated dome room. They see hope for bipartisan action on Capitol Hill — to protect users and free speech alike. Siva reflects with guest-host Danielle Citron.
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AI enters Congress: Sexually explicit deepfakes target women lawmakers
Dec 17, 2024
Originally published by The 19th.
More than two dozen members of Congress have been the victims of sexually explicit deepfakes — and an overwhelming majority of those impacted are women, according to a new study that spotlights the stark gender disparity in this technology and the evolving risks for women’s participation in politics and other forms of civic engagement.
The American Sunlight Project (ASP), a think tank that researches disinformation and advocates for policies that promote democracy, released findings on Wednesday that identify more than 35,000 mentions of nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII) depicting 26 members of Congress — 25 women and one man — that were found recently on deepfake websites. Most of the imagery was quickly removed as researchers shared their findings with impacted members of Congress.
“We need to kind of reckon with this new environment and the fact that the internet has opened up so many of these harms that are disproportionately targeting women and marginalized communities,” said Nina Jankowicz, an online disinformation and harassment expert who founded The American Sunlight Project and is an author on the study.
Nonconsensual intimate imagery, also known colloquially as deepfake porn (though advocates prefer the former), can be created through generative AI or by overlaying headshots onto media of adult performers. There is currently limited policy to restrict its creation and spread.
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ASP shared the first-of-its-kind findings exclusively with The 19th. The group collected data in part by developing a custom search engine to find members of the 118th Congress by first and last name, abbreviations or nicknames on 11 well-known deepfake sites. Neither party affiliation nor geographic location had an impact on the likelihood of being targeted for abuse, though younger members were more likely to be victimized. The largest factor was gender, with women members of Congress being 70 times more likely than men to be targeted.
ASP did not release the names of the lawmakers depicted in the imagery to avoid encouraging searches. They did contact the offices of everyone impacted to alert them and offer resources on online harms and mental health support. Authors of the study note that in the immediate aftermath, imagery targeting most of the members was entirely or almost entirely removed from the sites — a fact they’re unable to explain. Researchers have noted that such removals do not prevent material from being shared or uploaded again. In some cases involving lawmakers, search result pages remained indexed on Google despite the content being largely or entirely removed.
“The removal may be coincidental. Regardless of what exactly led to removal of this content — whether ‘cease and desist’ letters, claims of copyright infringement, or other contact with the sites hosting deepfake abuse — it highlights a large disparity of privilege,” according to the study. “People, particularly women, who lack the resources afforded to Members of Congress, would be highly unlikely to achieve this rapid response from the creators and distributors of AI-generated NCII if they initiated a takedown request themselves.”
According to the study’s initial findings, nearly 16 percent of all the women who currently serve in Congress — or about 1 in 6 congresswomen — are the victims of AI-generated nonconsensual intimate imagery.
Jankowicz has been the target of online harassment and threats for her domestic and international work dismantling disinformation. She has also spoken publicly about being the victim of deepfake abuse — a fact she found out through a Google Alert in 2023.
“You can be made to appear in these compromised, intimate situations without your consent, and those videos, even if you were to say, pursue a copyright claim against the original poster, as in my case, they proliferate around the internet without your control and without some sort of consequence for the people who are amplifying or creating deepfake porn,” she said. “That continues to be a risk for anybody who is in the public eye, who is participating in public discourse, but in particular for women and for women of color.”
Image-based sexual abuse can have devastating mental health effects on victims, who include everyday people who are not involved in politics — including children. In the past year, there have been reports of high school girls being targeted for image-based sexual abuse in states like California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. School officials have had varying degrees of response, though the FBI has also issued a new warning that sharing such imagery of minors is illegal.
The full impact of deepfakes on society is still coming into focus, but research already shows that 41 percent of women between the ages of 18 and 29 self-censor to avoid online harassment.
“That is a hugely powerful threat to democracy and free speech, if we have almost half of the population silencing themselves because they’re scared of the harassment they could experience,” said Sophie Maddocks, research director at the Center for Media at Risk at the University of Pennsylvania.
There is no federal law that establishes criminal or civil penalties for someone who generates and distributes AI-generated nonconsensual intimate imagery. About a dozen states have enacted laws in recent years, though most include civil penalties, not criminal ones.
AI-generated nonconsensual intimate imagery also opens up threats to national security by creating conditions for blackmail and geopolitical concessions. That could have ripple effects on policymakers irrespective of whether they’re directly the target of the imagery.
“My hope here is that the members are pushed into action when they recognize not only that it’s affecting American women, but it’s affecting them,” Jankowicz said. “It’s affecting their own colleagues. And this is happening simply because they are in the public eye.”
Image-based sexual abuse is a unique risk for women running for office. Susanna Gibson narrowly lost her competitive legislative race after a Republican operative shared nonconsensual recordings of sexually explicit livestreams featuring the Virginia Democrat and her husband with The Washington Post. In the months after her loss, Gibson told The 19th she heard from young women discouraged from running for office out of fear of intimate images being used to harass them. Gibson has since started a nonprofit dedicated to fighting image-based sexual abuse and an accompanying political action committee to support women candidates against violations of intimate privacy.
Maddocks has studied how women who speak out in public are more likely to experience digital sexual violence.
“We have this much longer, ‘women should be seen and not heard’ pattern that makes me think about Mary Beard’s writing and research on this idea that womanhood is antithetical to public speech. So when women speak publicly, it’s almost like, ‘OK. Time to shame them. Time to strip them. Time to get them back in the house. Time to shame them into silence.’ And that silencing and that shaming motivation … we have to understand that in order to understand how this harm is manifesting as it relates to congresswomen.”
ASP is encouraging Congress to pass federal legislation. The Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act of 2024, also known as the DEFIANCE Act, would allow people to sue anyone who creates, shares or receives such imagery. The Take It Down Act would include criminal liability for such activity and require tech companies to take down deepfakes. Both bills have passed the Senate with bipartisan support, but have to navigate concerns around free speech and harm definitions, which are typical hurdles to tech policy, in the House.
“It would be a dereliction of duty for Congress to let this session lapse without passing at least one of these bills," Jankowicz said “It is one of the ways that the harm of artificial intelligence is actually being felt by real Americans right now. It's not a future harm. It's not something that we have to imagine.”
In the absence of congressional action, the White House has collaborated with the private sector to conceive creative solutions to curb image-based sexual abuse. But critics aren’t optimistic about Big Tech’s ability to regulate itself, given the history of harm caused by its platforms.
“It is so easy for perpetrators to create this content, and the signal is not just to the individual woman being targeted,” Jankowicz said. “It’s to women everywhere, saying, ‘If you take this step, if you raise your voice, this is a consequence that you might have to deal with.’”
If you have been a victim of image-based sexual abuse, the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative maintains a list of legal resources.
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Recommended
Is AI too big to fail?
Dec 13, 2024
This is the first entry in “Big Tech and Democracy,” a series designed to assist American citizens in understanding the impact technology is having — and will have — on our democracy. The series will explore the benefits and risks that lie ahead and offer possible solutions.
In the span of two or so years, OpenAI, Nvidia and a handful of other companies essential to the development of artificial intelligence have become economic behemoths. Their valuations and stock prices have soared. Their products have become essential to Fortune 500 companies. Their business plans are the focus of the national security industry. Their collapse would be, well, unacceptable. They are too big to fail.
The good news is we’ve been in similar situations before. The bad news is we’ve yet to really learn our lesson.
In the mid-1970s, a bank known for its conservative growth strategy decided to more aggressively pursue profits. The strategy worked. In just a few years the bank became the largest commercial and industrial lender in the nation. The impressive growth caught the attention of others — competitors looked on with envy, shareholders with appreciation and analysts with bullish optimism. As the balance sheet grew, however, so did the broader economic importance of the bank. It became too big to fail.
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Regulators missed the signs of systemic risk. A kick of the bank’s tires gave no reason to panic. But a look under the hood — specifically, at the bank’s loan-to-assets ratio and average return on loans — would have revealed a simple truth: The bank had been far too risky. The tactics that fueled its “go-go” years rendered the bank over exposed to sectors suffering tough economic times. Rumors soon spread that the bank was in a financially sketchy spot. It was the Titanic, without the band, to paraphrase an employee.
When the inevitable run on the bank started, regulators had no choice but to spend billions on keeping the bank afloat — saving it from sinking and bringing the rest of the economy with it. Of course, a similar situation played out during the Great Recession — risky behavior by a few bad companies imposed bailout payments on the rest of us.
AI labs are similarly taking gambles that have good odds of making many of us losers. As major labs rush to release their latest models, they are not stopping to ask if we have the social safety nets ready if things backfire. Nor are they meaningfully contributing to building those necessary safeguards. Instead, we find ourselves in a highly volatile situation. Our stock market seemingly pivots on earnings of just a few companies — the world came to a near standstill last month as everyone awaited Nvidia’s financial outlook. Our leading businesses and essential government services are quick to adopt the latest AI models despite real uncertainty as to whether they will operate as intended. If any of these labs took a financial tumble or any of the models were significantly flawed, the public would likely again be asked to find a way to save the risk takers.
This outcome may be likely but it’s not inevitable. The Dodd Frank Act passed in response to the Great Recession and intended to prevent another Too Big to Fail situation in the financial sector has been roundly criticized for its inadequacy. We should learn from its faults in thinking through how to make sure AI goliaths don’t crush all of us Davids. Some sample steps include mandating and enforcing more rigorous testing of AI models before deployment. It would also behoove us to prevent excessive reliance on any one model by the government — this could be accomplished by requiring public service providers to maintain analog processes in the event of emergencies. Finally, we can reduce the economic sway of a few labs by fostering more competition in the space.
Too Big to Fail scenarios have happened on too many occasions. There’s no excuse for allowing AI labs to become so large and so essential that we collectively end up paying for their mistakes.
Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University and a Tarbell fellow.
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Berwyn Collaborative: Understanding Community Needs
Dec 11, 2024
“We have good people here, and if we have help highlighting our good people, we can connect more, collaborate more, be more creative, and resist harder,” said Berwyn resident Isabel Gonzalez Smith.
On a breezy November Saturday afternoon, members of the Cook County suburban city, had the opportunity to meet with local journalists and be heard at the Liberty Cultural Center in Berwyn, IL.
The listening session was part of the Berwyn Collaborative: Understanding Community Needs, an engagement initiative led by News Ambassadors (NA) in partnership with Cicero Independiente, WBEZ, and Illinois Latino News (ILLN).
The project aims to actively engage residents through surveys and events rather than assuming what they need or want from local news coverage.
“We don’t see the public as an audience,” said Hugo Balta, publisher of ILLN and director of solutions journalism & DEI initiatives at The Fulcrum, who attended the event. “They are collaborators who help shape our news coverage. This project assists us in better understanding what issues matter most to the impassioned people of Berwyn.”
Irene Romulo is the Development and Community Engagement Coordinator for Cicero Independiente, and has played a pivotal role in helping the team navigate the cultural landscape of Berwyn. Romulo hopes this project can help enhance Cicero Independiente’s coverage of the area.
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“We want our news and information to meet the needs of Berwyn residents, we want to reach them in ways that work best for them,” said Romulo. “To be able to do this, we need to take the time to understand the needs of the people who live there.”
The Berwyn Collaborative seeks to understand the needs of Berwyn residents through community engagement by canvassing, sending out local news surveys, and hosting the community listening session. Once the needs of the community are better understood, the collaborative will produce solutions-based stories so that community needs can be met with solutions.
The project’s philosophy is founded on the ideas of Solution Journalism (SJ). Instead of simply highlighting something going wrong, the emphasis in SJ reporting is on how people are moving forward, building up, or responding to an issue.
Solutions Journalism can be loosely defined as “a specific reporting strategy to uplift solutions and common ground, not focused on problems, but on what people can do about them,” said Shia Levitt, director of News Ambassadors. “And then bringing local communities tools that can solve those problems.”
Shia Levitt and the NA team work with young journalists to foster stories shaped in solutions journalism or a depolarization reporting strategy in order to improve coverage of contentious issues. Project director Shia Levitt and the News Ambassadors team have brought solutions journalism or depolarization reporting methods to about 100 student journalists in seven states, impacting more than a half dozen communities across the country. The stories are not meant to be ‘hero worship’ feel-good pieces.
“Instead, solutions journalism stories are rigorous evidenced-based stories on how a response to a problem is working, or really what ways it’s working and what ways it is not,” said Levitt. Stories have to include “what are the limitations of a response someone is trying, and what are the insights and lessons learned that can help others trying to solve that problem in another place.”
Berwyn residents brought a vast range of emotions and opinions to the listening session. A particularly recurring theme was a frustration towards what they perceive to be a normalized culture of corruption amongst certain groups of locally elected officials. Participants also pointed out that there is a lack of transparency when it comes to government spending in Berwyn, and that the community needs a more detailed explanation of how money is allocated by the city council, and how building codes and regulations are decided upon.
“The vast majority [of Berwyn residents] are working class folks, and they don’t have time, and I speak with them personally, to go to the city council meetings or the school board meetings,” said Tomasa Ambriz, Berwyn Township Trustee. “Having someone that you can trust to give you adequate and accurate information at the end of those meetings, it’s vital.”
Many attendees stressed that the lack of accessible and transparent information about city governance is what allows for corruption and mismanagement to take place.
Another common theme was a strong community connection between the residents of Berwyn. One listening session group brainstormed ways in which the community can use grass roots efforts to address representative challenges.
“So we have to be careful about balancing new ideas with old ideas,” said Nester Zaualo, a social work student and Berwyn resident. “And give space for new voices and new ideas and some change, and I think that we have to also support each other in our individual roles [in that process].”
Zaulao also emphasized the importance of having a more detailed statistical framework about representative issues in Berwyn so that, based on those statistics, organizers can set specific short and long term goals.
“You’re talking about advocacy, you’re talking about change,” said Zaualo. “You have to have the numbers to back it up, you have to have the facts. If not, there’s only so much that’s going to happen with your emotions and passion, because I have my own emotions and passions. What’s going to cut through all that is data.”
The event culminated after months of canvassing and surveying the Chicago metropolitan community.
Preliminary survey results show residents want more bilingual resources, transparent information about the increased costs of living in Berwyn, and more police accountability. Residents also said they wanted more transparent news coverage, including positive news about their community.
The next chapter in the reporting project will continue in the new year when reporters will use on-the-ground canvassing, surveying, and listening session feedback to pitch and produce solution journalism-based stories about the Berwyn community.
The Berwyn Collaborative: Understanding Community Needs project is made possible thanks to the generous support of The Listening Post Collective.
Illinois Latino News (ILLN) will be recruiting fellows for the second leg of the Berwyn Collaborative: Understanding Community Needs project in the 2025 spring semester. If you’re a student (2-4+ year college/university) in good standing, and are interested in learning more about participating in the initiative, please email them at info@latinonewsnetwork.com.
Krippner is a solutions-based, investigative journalist who studied at the Northwestern Medill School of Journalism. His work brings to light and analyzes solutions to complex issues in various communities, and he extends local analysis to wider societal trends.
This story was originally published by the Latino News Network
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Listening in a time of disinformation
Dec 10, 2024
The very fabric of truth is unraveling at an alarming rate; Howard Thurman's wisdom about listening for the sound of the genuine is not just relevant but urgent. In the face of the escalating crisis of disinformation, distortion and the unsettling normalization of immoral and unethical practices, particularly in electoral politics and executive leadership, the need to cultivate the art of discernment and informed listening is more pressing than ever.
Thurman, a theologian and civil rights leader, understood that a more profound, authentic sound can guide persons toward justice, compassion and truth amidst the cacophony of life. Thurman believed sincerely in the spiritual discipline of listening. More specifically, listening for the genuineness in sound — truth. Such sound or truth is imminent from within ourselves and reverberates in the world around us. In the face of lies, manipulation and the erosion of ethical standards, especially in the current presidential transition, Thurman's admonishment to listen for the genuine remains a beacon of hope and a practical strategy for resistance and transformation.
How do we listen for the genuine in such a fraught and confusing time? First, commit to honesty and truth-telling, even when difficult or uncomfortable. This means seeking out credible sources of information, fact-checking and being willing to question and challenge false or misleading narratives, especially those who seek to justify their l behavior.
Second, it is helpful to listen intently to and amplify the voices of those historically marginalized and silenced. The authentic sound of justice and equity often comes from the edges and fringes of society, from those who have the most to lose when the truth is distorted and ethics are abandoned. By centering the perspectives and experiences of the most vulnerable, we can gain a greater sense of what is truly at stake in this moment. This is a humane responsibility we all share and a powerful source for encouraging change.
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Listening to the genuine is about more than just absorbing information or perspectives. Genuine listening is a powerful tool that catalyzes discernment and action, enabling listeners to distinguish between the proverbial noise and the deeper sound of truth and moral rightness. This type of attentiveness is not a passive process. On the contrary, genuine listening is an active intellectual exercise that provokes critical thinking, ethical reflection, compassion and integrity, empowering us to make a difference.
Acknowledging the sound of the genuine also warrants a thoughtful and intentional response or action. When we hear the ring of truth, it demands that we not only recognize it, but that we mobilize in some way. This might mean challenging or correcting the inaccuracies and misinformation that surround us, whether in our personal conversations or in the public discourse. It could involve advocating for policies and practices that align with ethical standards and promote justice and equality. At times, it may even call for engaging in diverse forms of activism, from signing petitions and attending marches to contacting our elected officials and volunteering our time and skills to causes that matter.
Listening to the genuine and then acting in response has the potential to give way to a different kind of body politics and society — one that is grounded in plausible and substantiated premises, rather than lies and propaganda. A society built on the genuine would be one that upholds morality and ethics at its core, rather than self-interest and greed. It would be a society that shows a deep and abiding concern for the collective good of all people, recognizing that our individual well-being is inextricably tied to innumerable others.
In this kind of society, we would work together to address our shared challenges and to build a future that is more just, equitable and peaceful for all. I concur with Thurman that listening for the genuine sound is both spiritual and political. This particular approach to activating auditory perception is a way of tuning our hearts and minds towards the deep. Listening to the sound of the genuine is a means of radical resistance to inhumane, immoral and antidemocratic forces.
In the crucible of this moment, revisit Thurman's wisdom, like me. Listen and seek out sounds of the genuine, within and without self. Allow truth to serve as a compass in the face of disinformation, authoritarianism and acceptance of flawed efficacy.
Johnson is a United Methodist pastor, the author of "Holding Up Your Corner: Talking About Race in Your Community" and program director for the Bridge Alliance, which houses The Fulcrum.
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