Gendered disinformation exists at the intersection of online disinformation and gender-based violence (GBV). As a form of digital misogyny, it is a subset of online gender-based harassment.
It uses discreditation, shaming, and intimidation attacks to silence women who seek to participate equally in public life.
It must be noted that the scope of this article is limited to how gendered disinformation presents in the North American context. While many of the tactics used may be applicable to cases in other NATO member states, it does not aim to establish an all-encompassing, universal definition.
Despite this, the overall purpose for weaponizing gender disinformation remains consistent — abuse of women who “dare” participate in fields misogynists feel they have the right to dominate. This includes politics. Gendered disinformation attacks happen at multiple levels of political life. Most often, they diffuse downwards from attacks on public figures to ordinary women.
The personal level.
Like other forms of online gender-based harassment, gendered disinformation narratives begin on social media platforms. What distinguishes them, however, is the use of “malign creativity.” Malign creativity is the deliberate obscuring of misogynistic language to avoid detection by social media platforms. This strategy employs coded language, context-based meme imagery, and other sexualized semiotic tactics in targeted harassment campaigns to do so.
Perpetrators’ ultimate goal with this is to make their abuse more difficult for women to report — isolating their targets and driving them to withdraw both on- and off-line.
The public level.
Gendered disinformation attacks against individual women are only possible due to the permissive nature of online political discourse towards GBV against women at the highest levels of political power.
Narratives that use gendered disinformation to target female politicians and political candidates do so at a disproportionate level to male peers. The Wilson Center’s landmark study on the topic, Malign Creativity: How Gender, Sex, and Lies are Weaponized Against Women Online, traced this discrepancy through the 2020 U.S. presidential election period. It analyzed 13 female politicians and candidates from diverse countries of origin and identities over the course of this politically-volatile period. During this time, they faced over 300,000 gendered disinformation attacks across three broad categories of narratives.
The most common were sexualized disinformation attacks. Lowest in terms of hostility levels were fake stories spread about research subjects’ sexual histories. At times, these escalated to rape threats and deepfake pornographic images.
Women with intersectional identities also faced and continue to face simultaneous racialized and transphobic disinformation attacks. Vice President Kamala Harris is an example of a prominent female politician who faced all three during both the 2020 and 2024 U.S. presidential elections. Harris was accused of sleeping her way to the highest echelons of government service. Social media posts promoting this narrative were further accompanied by racially- or sexually-abusive hashtags mocking her, as well as deepfakes. Other narratives insinuated she was secretly a transgender man named Kamal Aroush — suggesting she could not hold power without actually being a man.
Although tailored to the personal histories of other research subjects involved, the gendered disinformation attacks they faced took on similar patterns.
Like other forms of misogyny and GBV, the looming threat of gendered disinformation constrains even the behavior of women not directly attacked. By delegitimizing the presence of women in public service, gendered disinformation makes women as a whole more likely to opt out of public discourse on key political issues. Preventing half of the population from having equal rights and representation perpetuates a gender-imbalanced shaping of a nation’s political future.
National security implications.
Intending to provide readers with an overview of the concept of gendered disinformation, this article established frameworks for its occurrence at the personal and public levels. In the second installation of this series, discussion will move to how gendered disinformation poses a threat to national security.
Photo: “Headache” (2017) by Jose Navarro via Flickr. CC by 2.0.
Disclaimer: Any views or opinions expressed in articles are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the NATO Association of Canada.
