Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • Deny and distract

    Grief is a horrendous thing, and it’s something we all process in different ways. And Brianna Ghey’s mum, Esther, is grieving something no parent should have to go through: the death of her child, a death whose brutality and ferocity are beyond most people’s understanding.

    With grief comes guilt, an endless parade of what-ifs and if-onlys that come to torture you in the hours where you can’t sleep. And I think Esther Ghey is feeling that acutely right now, because any parent would: of course you’d spend endless hours wondering what you missed, what you could have done differently, what single thing would have prevented this terrible thing from happening. Trying to make sense of the senseless is what we humans do.

    The latest reports suggest that Ghey thinks that social media may have played a part in the death of her daughter. And the way in which this is being reported is starting to look like victim blaming. If Brianna hadn’t been so active online maybe she wouldn’t have been so isolated in real life, and maybe that would mean she wouldn’t have been picked for her vulnerability, and maybe…

    I don’t agree with her, although I understand why Brianna’s mum is on a mission: for many years I’ve been delivering lectures about the regulation of the internet and social media, and sadly every year there are new calls for regulation from yet another grieving parent of yet another kid who should still be here and who is trying to make some sense of a senseless tragedy and ensure no other child experiences what their child experienced. But with this particular horror the press has a vested interest in the internet-did-it narrative, because it lets the real guilty parties off the hook.

    Newspapers blaming the internet for Brianna’s murder have spent six or seven years demanding the institutionalised bullying of trans kids in schools, have fought tooth and nail against hate crime legislation, have portrayed anti-trans hatred as acceptable “debate” and have continually platformed people and organisations who say that trans people are monsters to be hated and feared and eliminated from society.

    As one of the people I follow on social media put it: if you think social media’s bad, you should see what they put in the papers.

    LGBTQ+ people and advocates have been trying to raise the alarm for years, and again and again their warnings have been ignored or even ridiculed. And now that the very thing they feared and tried to prevent is happening, the press, politicians and public figures are doing their very best to deny or distract.

    I’m writing this the day after it emerged that a non-binary kid in the US died after a savage beating by multiple teenagers in the school toilets, a beating that appears to be because of their gender identity; they lived in Oklahoma, whose schools are run by one of the most viciously anti-trans bigots around. Earlier this month, it emerged that a trans teen was stabbed multiple times in North London, an attempted murder apparently because others took exception to seeing a trans person. And despite the best efforts of the press to play it down, the murder of Brianna was in part because one of her killers was repulsed by the fact she was trans.

    I have enormous sympathy for Brianna’s mum. But I think that in her grief and in her pain, in her attempts to make sense of something so senseless, she’s unaware that others are seeking to exploit her, to turn the focus away from the press, the politicians and the public figures who’ve spent six-plus years trying to make the world more lethal for trans and non-binary people.

    I got a call from the BBC last week asking me to come on air regarding Brianna; not to talk about her murder, or the climate of hatred that makes so many of us genuinely afraid, but whether we should ban kids from having phones. I declined, of course. But the framing is telling. There’s no interest in investigating what’s really contributing to the hatred that led to the murder of a young woman, the attempted murder of another and the attack that appears to have killed a third teen. Because that would mean asking questions whose answers are far too uncomfortable, and far too close to home.

     

  • The job

    It’s been said so often that it’s a cliché, but the job of journalism is to report the truth. Its job is to investigate, to find facts, and to follow those facts to see where they lead. It is a process of discovering, of uncovering, of seeing and telling what’s really going on.

    In order to do that, you need to be objective. We all have biases, assumptions and other weaknesses. But in journalism the job is to put them aside, to accept that if the facts contradict your pre-existing beliefs then those beliefs need to change. Because your job is not to shore up your own biases, but to find the truth.

    With some irony, the publisher of The New York Times has written extensively about that here.

    Independence asks reporters to adopt a posture of searching, rather than knowing. It demands that we reflect the world as it is, not the world as we may wish it to be. It requires journalists to be willing to exonerate someone deemed a villain or interrogate someone regarded as a hero. It insists on sharing what we learn—fully and fairly—regardless of whom it may upset or what the political consequences might be. Independence calls for plainly stating the facts, even if they appear to favor one side of a dispute. And it calls for carefully conveying ambiguity and debate in the more frequent cases where the facts are unclear or their interpretation is under reasonable dispute, letting readers grasp and process the uncertainty for themselves.

    Sulzberger’s words here are absolutely true, but it’s worth considering why he’s writing the piece: it’s in response to growing criticism that the New York Times often breaks those rules. That’s certainly the case in its reporting of trans issues where, often by using the opinion section to avoid fact-checking, journalists act as anti-trans propagandists.

    One of the worst of many such propagandists is Pamela Paul, whose ongoing campaign against trans people continued this week with a really shoddy piece about teen detransition. When some trans journalists identified howling errors in her reporting, she dismissed them as activists; when they wrote to the NYT about the flaws in her piece, the paper refused to publish it because it was a criticism in part of their output. Their letter is here.

    The issue with Paul’s work is simple enough: she apparently adopts a policy of knowing, rather than searching. She appears to reflect the world as she may wish it to be, not the world as it is. She does not plainly state the facts. And she does not carefully convey ambiguity or debate.

    At its very simplest, journalism’s job is all about the Ws: who, what, when, why. For every assertion you make, you need to provide solid evidence. So if you say there is an epidemic of X, you need to demonstrate that there is indeed an epic of X. But Paul doesn’t do that. Quite the opposite.

    Writing in Slate, epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, who is neither trans nor a trans activist, investigates the numbers behind Paul’s claimed epidemic of detransition. And – surprise! – they don’t back up her claims.

    That’s not to say that there aren’t detransitioners, or that there isn’t regret. Of course there are. Of course there is. But the question that journalism should be answering isn’t “does this happen?” but “how significant is it?” For example, there are cis women who regret having breast reduction or breast enhancement surgeries, and as far as I can tell the regret rates there are similar, and possibly slightly higher, than the regret rates for top surgery for trans men. Where are the endless editorials about that?

    What’s clear from this evidence is that the vast majority of people do not experience regret, howsoever defined, after transitioning genders. Regret rates are actually much higher for a lot of medical procedures. 

    The whole premise for these articles is a house built on sand. And competent reporters will know that, which means the people who choose not to let the facts colour their articles are incompetent, malevolent or compromised.

    By any metric, the rate of trans detransitioners is tiny; the rate of trans people who regret transition similarly so. Which invites a key question: why the panic? What motive does Paul have to consistently misrepresent what’s actually happening, to abandon the basic tenets of journalism to scaremonger instead? Why is the potential regret of a handful of cisgender people a crisis when the actual removal of healthcare for thousands of trans people is not?

    That’s a rhetorical question.

    Meyerowitz-Katz:

    Ultimately, the question of what proportion of kids or adults regret their transition is only important to a select group: the people who want to transition, and their clinicians. At worst, the rate of regret is still better than other treatments which don’t require national debates over their use, which really begs the question of why anyone who isn’t directly involved with the treatment of transgender people is even weighing in on the topic at all.

  • Sunak

    Just three days after PM Rishi Sunak cried crocodile tears over the death of trans teen Brianna Ghey, he was back to making jokes about trans girls and women in parliament. While Ghey’s mother was in the gallery, and he knew she was there.

  • Vultures

    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.

    Daily Mail advert: "NOW WATCH THE MAIL'S EXCLUSIVE 40-MINUTE VIDEO DOCUMENTARY"

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.