WEF urges censorship of AI-generated ‘gendered disinformation’

Governments and tech companies should censor AI-generated “gendered disinformation” and other “falsehoods,” the World Economic Forum (WEF) wrote in an article Friday.

Criticizing women in the public sphere harms democracy

According to the US State Department, gendered disinformation is the use of “false or misleading gender and sex-based narratives” against “women and people with intersecting identities.” The US government warns that gendered disinformation discourages women in the public sphere — such as politicians, journalists, and activists — which in turn harms democracy, according to government officials.

In its article, the WEF expressed a view parallel to the State Department’s, claiming that gendered disinformation leads to misogyny which will in turn cause “widespread societal harm.”

“[D]isinformation campaigns can target specific demographics with AI-generated harmful content. Gendered disinformation, for example, perpetuates stereotypes and misogyny, further marginalizing vulnerable groups,” the organization said.

“Such campaigns manipulate public perception, leading to widespread societal harm and deepening existing social divides.”

The AI Governance Alliance

In January, the WEF declared misinformation and disinformation to be “the most severe global risk” over the next two years, more than other issues like inflation, cyber insecurity, and economic downturn. 

The WEF writes, however, that it is combating misinformation with the AI Governance Alliance, an initiative the organization launched earlier this year to address “misleading or harmful content.” The alliance includes national governments and the globe’s largest tech companies, such as Microsoft, Meta, Google, Adobe, IBM, OpenAI, and Amazon.

The Global Coalition for Digital Safety

Another WEF initiative designed to censor “harmful content” is the Global Coalition for Digital Safety (GCDS). This consortium comprises many of the same members from the AI Governance Alliance, such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, British regulator Ofcom, Belgium, Ukraine, INTERPOL, Bangladesh, Australia, Singapore, TikTok, and the UN. It also includes the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank linked to US intelligence agencies and globalist billionaires George Soros and Bill Gates. The coalition specifically thanks Hacks/Hackers, an organization commissioned by the federal government for censorship projects like ridding Wikipedia of vaccine criticism.

Last year, a working group of the WEF’s GCDS published a Typology of Online Harms outlining which content qualifies as “harmful.” This included “hate speech,” which refers to any negative communication about a person’s “identity factor,” even referring to them as a “pest.” It also included “technology-facilitated gender-based violence,” which is when digital content causes “psychological, social, political or economic harm or other infringements of rights and freedoms on the basis of gender characteristics.”

The GCDS also cautioned against “gendered disinformation that specifically targets women political leaders, journalists and other public figures, employing deceptive or inaccurate information and images to perpetuate stereotypes and misogyny.”