For the first paper session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen I am in a session on disinformation and conspiracies, which starts with Marilia Gehrke and Eedan Amit-Danhi, whose focus is on gendered disinformation. Gendered disinformation includes manipulated images, using image editing and increasingly also generative AI; this often references sexuality and personal identity.
Much of the scholarship to date has tended to focus on gender or disinformation, but not on both together; it also tends to focus on intentionality, even though the harm that gendered disinformation produces does not depend on whether this content was shared with the intent to harm or out of a genuine believe in its veracity. The question of intentionality that distinguishes mis- and disinformation is important only under certain circumstances, and both forms have a potential to produce harm. Even quality journalism, in its reporting on such harmful content, can then also produce further harm.
We must emphasise the intersectional aspects of gendered disinformation, therefore, and its connections with online violence; it is understood elsewhere also as identity-related disinformation, gendered online disinformation, and gender and identity disinformation. Gender becomes one of the aspects that such disinformation highlights, and might intersect with other identity attributes. The violence that such content perpetrates is a critical aspect to investigate here.
Such violence thus often also connects with and continues colonial violence and discursive toxicity on social media, and online and offline violence connect closely with each other too. Gender disinformation employs systematic and multi-directional flows of violence to prevent women and gender minorities from greater public participation. Its study must consider the multimedia content and its creators, its victims, and its audiences, and the interconnections and information flows between these three groups. Audiences in particular are both witnessing and experiencing harms on victims, and witnessing and enacting harms by creators. The study of these processes requires mixed-methods methodologies that engage with these the groups, and capture the system-level processes that take place here.
