Morning, Rulers! What a week. The country decided against electing its first woman president, instead sending Donald Trump back to the White House. Today, we’ll dive into one of the potential forces driving voters’ decisions on Tuesday: the internet. Let’s get into it. The far-right weaponized racist and sexist memes, online posts and satirical deepfakes about Vice President Kamala Harris in an attempt to derail her presidential campaign, from “Comrade Kamala” tweets, to insinuations that she used sex to advance her career to AI-generated images of her dressed like a sex worker. In many ways, it worked. Harris’ loss on Tuesday may be partly attributable to today’s social media environment, which is exceptionally vulnerable to misogynistic disinformation from the far-right, according to researchers studying digital harm targeting women leaders. “I have never seen this fierce of an ecosystem organized to carry far-right tropes, stereotypes and narratives than this election,” #ShePersisted co-founder Kristina Wilfore says in an interview with Women Rule. “In the United States, electoral behavior has really been impacted by the social media environment,” and the “weaponizing of misogyny for political gain,” Wilfore’s co-founder Lucina Di Meco adds. #ShePersisted is an organization researching digital threats against women in politics. Wilfore and Di Meco call for increased regulation of social media platforms’ political content to protect voters from false narratives and ensure women have an equal chance at holding office. As they see it, the unregulated proliferation of political content on social media and AI could become a threat to the American electoral process — as well as American political gender parity. Trump’s success with young men at the polls, Wilfore says, could be because the demographic is particularly easy to target online. “Men are the most vulnerable to disinformation because they don't operate with guardrails on the internet. There's no unsafe spaces for them,” Wilfore says. “Young men have the highest trust of social media … as well as the false belief that they can't be manipulated online.” President-elect Donald Trump’s appeal to the “bro” demographic was apparent in his appearances alongside podcasters hyper popular with young, Gen Z men, like Joe Rogan, Logan Paul and Theo Von. The harms of social media against young women, by contrast, have been more widely spotlighted. They may exercise more caution online than a man. That’s how, Di Meco says, “a young man looking online for the exercise routine or how to find a date” will be “slowly primed … into a type of bubble where all of a sudden they have the impression everyone around you is believing this.” Trump during his campaign promoted a voter registration drive on dating apps and advertised on highly-listened to, male-friendly podcasts like “Kill Tony,” “MrBallen,” and “BS w/ Jake Paul.” The most fierce attacks that affected voting behavior toward Harris tapped “into implicit bias around people's perception of women's capacity to compete equally,” Wilfore says. For example, she says, the “conversations around, ‘Oh, I don't really know what [Harris] stands for,’” were really attacks on her leadership qualifications, Wilfore says. In another example, Trump in August reposted a post by another user on Truth Social with an image of Harris and Hillary Clinton that read: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…” The remark was a reference to former President Bill Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and a far-right narrative that Harris’ romantic relationship with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, whom she dated in the 1990s while he was speaker of the California State Assembly, was behind her political ascent. Other examples include, Dylan Dupree, a far-right influencer posted videos like these including AI deepfakes of Harris that aim to vulgarly satirize her. Two women presidential candidates — Hillary Clinton and now Harris — have lost to Trump. But Wilfore doesn’t think that proves America is not ready to elect a female president. “There are still ways in which women's leadership is desired and normalized in other parts of our system,” Wilfore says. For instance, “Women represented 26.8 percent of the house races and 23.4 percent of Senate races” this year, a slight decrease from 2022, she adds. The Democratic Party nominated “38 percent women” at the House level, a slight increase from 2022, and 33 percent at the Senate level. Also, “the number of women registered to vote in the U.S. has typically been around 10 million higher than men.” “It's not that they hate women, it's not that people don't care about women,” Wilfore says. “It’s the dark arts of information manipulation that has always benefited fascist, violent leaning movements throughout history.” Despite Harris losing both the popular vote and the election, seven states on Tuesday passed ballot measures to protect abortion access — an issue she hoped to rest her campaign on — including in conservative strongholds like Missouri and Montana that Trump won by a landslide. The popularity of abortion as an issue, Wilfore argues, paints a picture of Americans voting against the woman candidate but, voting for women. “It's not a surprise, but it is still a gut punch,” Wilfore says of Tuesday’s election results. “Sometimes you have to lose everything before you rebuild in a different way. … We have power. Women have power in this moment.”
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