I wrote yesterday about newspapers profiting from spreading anti-trans hate: “Trans lives only matter to them if they can be monetised – and the cash is in calling us demons or crying crocodile tears over our coffins.”
Here’s the Daily Mail today.
Author: Carrie
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Crocodile tears
Content warning: child murder, transphobia, slurs
When primary school children were massacred in Dunblane in 1996, the UK responded with severe restrictions on gun ownership – and when twenty children and six adults were massacred in Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012, most people expected the US to do the same. No sane person can accept the murder of children.
It turns out that many people can.
Like the people who expected Sandy Hook to be the moment when the US said “no more”, I expected the same with the brutal murder of Brianna Ghey, whose killers were sentenced this week. Surely the murder of a young trans woman would make the UK’s anti-trans madness stop.
But I underestimated our politicians and our press. Faced with the murder of a young girl who was chosen in part because she was trans and whose killers used similar dehumanising language to them, they decided to circle the wagons instead.
From the outset, papers such as The Guardian – which has arguably done more than any other publication to promote transphobic groups in the UK and present them as reasonable rather than the dubiously funded religious and social conservatives they are – seized on initial comments by the police that transphobia wasn’t the motive for the murder. But as the court case continued, it became very clear that that wasn’t true. Transphobia wasn’t the sole motive, but it was still a key motive – a fact so apparent that this week the Daily Mail – the Daily Mail! – ran a headline saying that Ghey was murdered because she was trans.
The evidence presented by the prosecution left no room for doubt. One of the murderers hated Brianna because she was trans, and he used dehumanising and transphobic language during the planning of her murder. Her isolation, the killers agreed, made her an easier target. One of the murderers wanted to know whether she would scream like a boy or a girl when they stabbed her, and wanted to see her genitals.
The murderers’ sentencing took that into account; it was a hate crime, fuelled in part by transphobia.
The response to this has been predictably awful. One of the most prominent famous-author-approved “gender critical” figures turned to Twitter to blame Brianna’s mother, misgendering the girl, sexualising her and calling her mother “evil”. That post was liked by prominent anti-trans authors and journalists.
Rishi Sunak took time out from making anti-trans jokes in cabinet, overseeing the Tories’ ongoing assault on trans healthcare and human rights and answering Prime Minister’s questions with “but he doesn’t know what a woman is!” to cry some crocodile tears.
The Telegraph, among other papers, gave one of the murderers the attention she craved by posting not her mugshot but a glamour shot of her on its front page. After all, what’s sexier than a young woman who murders a tranny?
There have been some lone voices of sanity. Zoe Williams wrote a compelling piece in The Guardian arguing that “Trans people have been used instrumentally as a muster point for the right, and the far right, in media and in politics, and this has concrete, foreseeable results.” But that piece is an outlier from a paper whose own contributors were happily liking that tweet calling Ghey’s mother “evil”.
The response to the transphobic murder of a young woman has largely been a single, chilling fact: as far as the “gender critical” movement is concerned, the murder of Brianna Ghey is nothing more than inconvenient PR. In some circles – the circles that urge trans kids on social media to “KYS”; the circles that demand the removal of trans kids’ healthcare; the circles that demand schools out trans students, misgender them and isolate them; the circles that speak politely but genocidally about how trans people are “a huge problem for a sane world” and that their numbers should be “reduced” – this is a win.
For a few days, some of the papers will take it easy on trans people. Brianna’s murder will sell papers; having helped promote the intolerance that got Brianna killed, they’ll spend some time now profiting from it. But in a few days, when the horror has begun to fade, they’ll go back on the attack. Trans lives only matter to them if they can be monetised – and the cash is in calling us demons or crying crocodile tears over our coffins.
Update: Mic Wright’s piece on the coverage is well worth your time.
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A flat circle
The latest Garbage Day newsletter, on online extremism, the manosphere and Taylor Swift conspiracy theories, is very good.
Much of the digital playbook fueling this recruitment for our new(ish) international masculinist movement was created by ISIS, the true early adopters for this sort of thing. Though it took about a decade for the West to really embrace it. But nowadays, it is not uncommon to see trad accounts sharing memes about “motherhood,” that are pretty much identical to the Disney Princess photoshops ISIS brides would post on Tumblr to advertise their new life in Syria. And, even more darkly, just this week, a Trump supporter in Pennsylvania beheaded his father and uploaded it to YouTube, in a video where he ranted about the woke left and President Biden. Online extremism is a flat circle.
The biggest similarity, though, is in what I can cultural encoding. For ISIS, this was about constantly labeling everything that threatened their influence as a symptom of the decadent, secular West.
For our new International League Of Unfuckable Conservative Men, it is, increasingly, about labeling everything that threatens them as feminine and, thus, bad.
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Fake images, real harms
Over the last few days, I’ve read about two people who’ve been the subject of faked sexual images. Such images are typically created by grafting a person’s face onto the body of a porn performer, but increasingly this process is being handled by AI-type apps that can create very convincing-looking fakes with minimal human input.
Irrespective of the techniques used, the intention is the same: to dehumanise, to degrade. But the response to such abuse depends very much on how much power you have. When the images are of Taylor Swift, even X/Twitter will eventually take action, albeit in a cursory manner after many hours and many more millions of image shares. When you’re 14-year-old schoolgirl Mia Janin, you have no such power.
Janin killed herself after being bullied at her school by male classmates, some of whom it’s reported pasted images of her and her friends’ faces onto pornography that was then shared around the school via mobile phones. It was part of a wider campaign of abuse against her, and the use of sexual images is a form of abuse that’s increasingly common: according to the latest figures from the National Police Chief’s Council, for 2022, some 52% of sexual offences against children were committed by other children, 82% of the offending children were boys and one-quarter of those offences involved the creation and sharing of sexual images. And as ever, these figures are the tip of an iceberg: the NPCC estimates that five out of six offences are never reported.
As Joan Westenberg writes, when even Taylor Swift isn’t protected from such abuse, what chance do ordinary women and girls and other powerless people have?
When a platform struggles (or simply refuses) to protect someone with Swift’s resources, it shows the vulnerability of us all. Inevitably, the risks of AI misuse, deepfakes and nonconsensual pornography will disproportionately affect marginalized communities, including women, people of colour, and those living in poverty. These groups lack the resources to fight back against digital abuse, and their voices will not be heard when they seek justice or support.
There are growing concerns that just as the rise of generative AI apps makes such fakes easier than ever, social networks are cutting back on the very trust and safety departments whose job it is to stop such material from being spread. Today, X/Twitter announced that in response to the Taylor Swift fakes it will create a new trust and safety centre and hire 100 content moderators. Before Musk took over, the social network had more than 1,500. And as this is a Musk announcement, those 100 new moderators may never be hired at all.
X/Twitter is an extreme example, but the history of online regulation has a recurring thread: tech firms will do the absolute minimum they can get away with doing when it comes to moderating content. Content moderation is difficult, expensive and even with AI help, labour intensive. It’s also a fucking horrible job that leaves people seriously traumatised. But it’s necessary, and as technologies such as AI image generation become more widespread it needs more investment, not less. You shouldn’t need to be Taylor Swift to be protected from online abuse.
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The Grey Goo
Following on from yesterday’s post about bots ruining social media, the excellent Ian Betteridge writes about what we can expect when creating crap is much faster than detecting it.
This is the AI Grey Goo scenario: an internet choked with low-quality content, which never improves, where it is almost impossible to locate public reliable sources for information because the tools we have been able to rely on in the past – Google, social media – can never keep up with the scale of new content being created.
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Death by a billion bots
Via Joan Westenberg on Threads, here’s ReplyGuy. ReplyGuy is a bot that will find conversations on the internet and promote your product automatically by spamming those conversations while pretending to be people.
Every day we take a step closer to the dead internet, where the bulk of online conversations are bots talking to bots and humans are left in the margins, if they’re there at all. So much of social media is now bot-based rather than people-based.
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Faking the news
There’s an excellent example of how newspapers create and maintain moral panics in the Sunday Times today, when Camilla Long notes with horror that:
One school in Wales has written to parents saying it will not be providing “litter trays” for children “who identify as cats”.
The reason for the letter was to debunk the idea that any children were identifying as cats, an anti-trans internet fiction enthusiastically spread by, er, The Times and The Sunday Times on multiple occasions.
For example: “reports last week of a girl identifying as a cat”, 24 June 2023; “a litter of teenagers who self-identify as cats have begun stalking [a] town”, July 10 2023; “A friend of mine who runs a nice little café was surprised one day to see an adolescent girl enter his establishment, dressed from whiskers to tail as a cat… the girl identifies as a cat, Mum and Dad [explained]”, 24 December 2023. And so on.
As I’ve written before, there is a horrific grain of truth to the story: some schools do indeed have litter trays in classrooms. Those schools are in America, where litter trays are provided in case a child needs to go to the toilet during an active shooter drill or active shooting.
Like most anti-LGBTQ+ bullshit, the “kids are identifying as cats” story was fabricated by the right-wing press – in this case Fox News, before being amplified by Turning Point UK (a hard right pressure group) and GB News. It then spread via The Telegraph, the Daily Mail, LBC and, inevitably, The Times and Sunday Times. It was then picked up by beleaguered PM Rishi Sunak who condemned “schools [that] are allowing children to identify as cats, horses and dinosaurs.” None of those things happened.
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Whispered words and power chords
Somewhat later than planned, I’m delighted to tell you about the new HAVR EP: Love Will Save Us From Sadness. Which perhaps could have been called “Hey, do you guys ever think about dying?”
It’s our best work yet, I think, and I’m particularly proud of the lyrics: these are songs from a sad place but there’s a lot of positivity and joy in them as well as meditations on grief and loss. Over the course of the EP you’ll find crashing waves of Fender strats, hazy pop, huge layers of distortion and, of course, some anthemic rock.
As ever, we’ve got the music on bandcamp and you can have it for free; I’ll be putting them on the usual streaming services shortly.
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Death should be the end
There’s a joke I like about technology companies, first posted by Alex Blechman:
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus
Like the best jokes it’s funny because it’s true: all too often, tech firms care about whether they could do something rather than whether they should. Which is how a supposedly AI-generated comedy routine by George Carlin, who died in 2008, came to be made.
I say “supposedly” because the whole thing seems awfully fishy. But what’s definitely true is that some people have created a Carlin sound-a-like, and it’s awful. Ed Zitron:
AI-Carlin’s jokes feel like they were generated by feeding transcripts of his real work into a generative AI, with the resulting CarlinGPT bot prompted by Sasso and Kultgen and its outputs heavily edited.
If this was entirely written by humans, it is even more shameful, both in how terribly unfunny it is and how little they understand Carlin’s work.
Finding bad examples of AI isn’t difficult: significant parts of the internet seem to be using it to create overly bright images of improbably breasted young women with waists so tiny that if they were real women, they’d snap. But I think there’s one example that is so bad you’d think I’d invented it, and it’s about this painting by Keith Haring.
The painting is called Unfinished because, as you can see, it’s unfinished. That’s deliberate, because it was the final painting of Haring’s life: the unpainted section represents the many lives lost to AIDS. He died the following year.
A few days ago, an AI user finished it.
I thought it was a joke, but it doesn’t appear to be. Somebody has used generative AI to complete the painting, to fill in the space and to remove the very thing that makes it so meaningful and so powerful. The fact that the AI has produced shoddy work is almost irrelevant, because of course it did. The whole exercise is a classic example of someone who could do something, but who should not do it.
In electronic publishing, a plague of crap AI-generated content is an unintentionally ironic echo of Orwell’s 1984, in which a key character works “in the Fiction Department [in] some mechanical job on one of the fiction-writing machines.”
She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor… She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She “didn’t much care for reading,” she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
And it’s not just art. Serious people are spending serious money to create AI versions of people, so that in the not too distant future you’ll be able to converse with an AI chatbot that mimics the voice and the speaking mannerisms of your favourite dead loved ones so that you can attempt to cheat the Grim Reaper – something we’ve seen described many times over in literature, rarely with a happy ending attached.
Rather than building machines to simulate storytellers, tech evangelists might be better off reading some of them. They might want to start with W W Jacobs’ story The Monkey’s Paw.
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Dirty tricks, tested on trans
England’s buffer zone laws, voted in by an overwhelming majority of MPs, will be deliberately undermined by new Home Office guidance. That’s according to the I Paper, which says that despite legislation banning religious groups from harassing women, the guidance says that forced birthers “would still be able to approach women attending clinics, conduct “silent prayer” and offer information to and engage in discussion with patients, all inside the 150m zones.”
The guidance is currently open for consultation and if you care about women’s rights, you should contribute. Because you can be sure that the forced birthers will.
This is a particularly twisted trick, because it effectively tells the police and other authorities not to enforce a law designed specifically to protect vulnerable people; it says that those people’s rights don’t matter, irrespective of what the letter and the spirit of the law says. And it’s a trick we’ve seen before, because it’s exactly what Liz Truss has done via the EHRC and its guidance regarding the Equality Act and its protections for trans people.
Truss has close links with the US Heritage Foundation, a key driver of anti-trans and anti-abortion activity in the US; I wasn’t aware of Cleverly having similar links but whether by accident or design he too is serving up something from the evangelical right’s wish list.
As I’ve written many times, I’ve long since given up on expecting most people to care about trans rights. But if you’re not a straight white Christian man, you should be paying attention to the tricks politicians, media groups and hate groups are using to target us and roll back our rights. Because as we’ve seen again and again, what they test on us is only ever the beginning.