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Katie Hill, deepfakes, and how “political risk” is defined

Wmc Features Katie Hill Gage Skidmore 110719
Rep. Katie Hill (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

Last week, Democratic Rep. Katie Hill of California resigned from office after the conservative website RedState published sexualized nude images without her consent. The pictures accompanied a salacious article about Hill and her husband’s joint affair with a member of Hill’s campaign staff. Hill has vehemently objected to the suggestion that she also engaged in an improper relationship with one of her congressional aides, a situation now under House ethics review. As scholar Mary Anne Franks explained, the photographs, which were supplied to the media outlet by Hill’s abusive husband, were not necessary to convey information regarding her possible misconduct. The relationship in question was also documented in detailed text messages. Hill’s resignation and the course of events more broadly have provoked the latest round of commentary, and, often, stark differences in opinion, regarding sexting and public life.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who has praised Hill as an “absolutely outstanding young public servant” and decried her exposure “to public humiliation by cyber exploitation,” was also quoted as saying, in a closed-door meeting, “It goes to show you, we should say to young candidates, and to kids in kindergarten really, be careful when transmitting photos.”

No woman can ever be careful enough. There is almost nothing that any woman politician can do to stem the production and spread of sexualized abuse and propaganda. What happened to Hill has nothing to do with how careful she was or wasn’t with her images. All her case shows is how easily and casually intimate abuse can be weaponized politically, how specious maintaining a border between “private” and “public” can be. The impulse to tell women to “stay safe” might seem pragmatic, but it’s also completely useless as a challenge to threats like those Hill faces. In addition, “staying safe” advice has always been about controlling women’s ability to function freely in public space by working around the expectation of violation and violence. This is no different.

A major crime, what is commonly referred to as “revenge porn,” was perpetrated against Hill. It was committed when RedState and Hill’s estranged husband colluded to publish her intimate photographs. In running the photos, RedState profited from her abuse. In consuming the images, millions of people participated in her abuse. Her political opponents have exploited her intimate partner abuse for their strategic gain. Those admonishing her and other women are sidelining the criminality, venality, and misogyny that should be the focus of this discussion. It’s not even subtle. The primary authors of Hill-related RedState articles? Both former campaign advisors to GOP Congressman Steve Knight, defeated by Hill last year. 

Using sexualization is an easy way to attack women politicians, and it is made even easier because our political pundit class continues to see sexualization as a privacy invasion instead of the tactic of public and political aggression that it clearly is. Nonconsensual pornification is powerfully propagandistic but routinely portrayed, and minimized, as private entertainment. For women, particularly women like Hill who don’t conform to heteropatriarchal expectations, the threats are even more acute. Hill’s case is a blunt example the heightened risks that LGBTQ people face in public life.

In this instance, actual photographs of Hill were used against her. In many others, however, actual photographs are not available or necessary. The “revenge porn” used to target Hill exists alongside an array of image-based tactics that use sexualization to defame and target women politicians.

Forty-two percent of women legislators surveyed globally in 2016 by the Inter-Parliamentary Union reported being targeted by “extremely humiliating or sexually charged images.”

Last month, for example, ProPublica broke a story about a closed Facebook page for U.S. Border Patrol agents in which members shared violent content targeting migrants and members of Congress. Among the most denigrating posts shared on the page was a meme showing a smirking President Donald Trump holding Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by the neck and forcing her head into his crotch. The caption read, “That’s right bitches. The masses have spoken and today democracy won.” Another, pornographically titled “Lucky Illegal Immigrant Glory Hole Special Starring AOC,” showed Ocasio-Cortez performing fellatio. Media mainly described the images and posts as “vile” and “obscene.” They were primarily framed as denigrations that hurt the women’s feelings or invaded their privacy. Those are legitimate descriptions, but harms go far beyond the effects on an individual and her feelings.

Depicting women politicians as sexually sullied, violable, voracious, or promiscuous is a gendered tactic of harassment that undermines women as politicians, has spillover effects on the public’s confidence in women as leaders and citizens, and is profoundly anti-democratic. The political relevance of what happens to women politicians as public figures, however, continues to be discounted. Consider how we think about threats represented by deepfake technology.

Earlier this year, video deliberately slowed down to make Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi appear to be slurring her words spurred a profusion of think pieces about the coming dangers of manipulated video and deepfakes. “The outright altering of sound and visuals signals a concerning new step,” read one article. “Deepfakes have got Congress panicking,” blared another. “The Media Talks Politics While The Public Is Interested In Pornography,” explained a third, articulating the juxtaposition clearly. What about pornography as political? The only way you can portray the malicious manipulation of sound and visuals as a new and dangerous political weapon is if you ignore women as politicians. For women, nonconsensual pornography has long been a central element of political misinformation, reputational attacks, impersonation, and threats.

Millions of people viewed the Pelosi video, but many millions more have seen rape memes, sexualized “parodies,” and pornographic impersonations featuring Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama, and countless other women leaders globally. Why no uproar among a persistently homogenous political pundit class, recently described by writer Rebecca Traister as being made of many “men who have sketchy histories around gender and power”?

It is often the case that, as with text-based threats, sexualized imagery focuses on stopping women from speaking, with depictions of choking, strangulation, oral rape. These depictions of women leaders appear on platforms ranging from Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit to 4chan, 8chan, and popular porn sites. More than 150,000 people have recently viewed sexually explicit videos claiming to portray Ocasio-Cortez available on an easily found deepfake porn site, and a simple search also easily debunks the claim by Pornhub, where impersonations already abound, to have banned deepfakes. Deepfakes are now a cause of major concern for political discourse. The industry, however, was launched into public consciousness with porn that nonconsensually featured celebrities, and includes women politicians. Those abuses and, in political media terms, gross misrepresentations seemed to raise no real red flags.

The only way the threat of deepfakes can be considered new and different, in terms of risk and harm, is if we treat the technology ahistorically and ignore women’s experiences as politically meaningful. Women’s faces and bodies have been used to create sexually explicit, demeaning, distorting representations in pornographic photographs, memes, and videos for years. For women, nonconsensual pornography has long been a central element of political misinformation, reputational attacks, impersonation, and threats.

When people see a woman sexually objectified, their confidence in her morality and leadership is eroded. They perceive her as less authoritative, less emotionally stable, and less trustworthy. Further, sexually objectified women are evaluated as less warm and intelligent. It is almost always the case, as in the examples on the Border Patrol Facebook page, that the harassment trades on multiple aspects of women’s identities, affecting women of color and LGTBQ people more frequently and intensely.

Women across the political spectrum are targeted in these ways with similar results. After the 2008 release of the hardcore “porn satire” “Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?” researchers found that voters who focused on Palin’s appearance, not even her pornification, showed reduced confidence in her abilities. Voters’ prior willingness to support the John McCain-Sarah Palin presidential/vice presidential ticket measurably declined after seeing her objectified. Researchers also measured a “spillover effect” that additionally led viewers to downgrade their perceptions of the competence of researchers who were women.

Arguably, images like these are part of a long history of political satire in which male politicians are also sexualized. The sexualization of men, however, does not seem to have similar adverse effects on viewer perceptions of their character or ability to lead. First, often the sexualization is used to conflate physical dominance and penetration with political dominance and power. This was the intent and effect of the Trump meme that Border Patrol agents posted on Facebook. Second, if that is not the case, the sexualization is degrading because sexual violation is the easiest way to feminize men, a degradation. In July, The New Republic ran (and then withdrew and apologized for) an article in which a writer described presidential candidate Mayor Pete Buttigieg in sexually explicit and demeaning language. Throughout the piece, the author referred to Buttigieg as “Mary Pete.” 

On June 13, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence convened a hearing on the political challenges posed by deepfakes and rapidly developing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. It was the first hearing to focus on these issues, despite years during which women politicians have been targeted, misrepresented, and threatened through the use of similar technological developments. Professor Danielle Citron, one of four experts testifying at the hearing, was the only one to bring up risks disproportionately affecting women. “Imagine that the night before the 2020 election a deepfake showed a candidate in a tight race doing something shocking he never did,” she explained. A simple online search makes it evident that on the eve of the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton didn’t have to imagine it at all.

Misinformation and fake news are characterized by the spread of deceptive or inaccurate information designed to alter public understanding for political gain. The vilification of women politicians and public figures through their sexualization does exactly this, and yet it is relegated, in a sexist miscategorization, to the realm of personal consumption and entertainment.

Telling young women, particularly those with political ambitions, to “be careful” and not take or share nude or sexualized images is useless as a way of combating either private abuse or the spread of sexualized political propaganda (a distinction that technology has rendered moot in any case). It also reveals sexist and outdated assumptions about what constitutes political misinformation and risk, assumptions that, at their core, reflect the belief that men are politicians, women are sex objects.

Katie Hill’s situation is a complicated one, including as it does a consensual three-way sexual relationship, the allegation of an inappropriate relationship with a staffer, and intimate partner violence. For most women politicians, however, the situation is simpler and starker, and yet pundits and political leaders have little to say about the proliferation of this form of political misinformation.

What Hill’s example, like so many others, highlights is that women continue to be second-class citizens who cannot have a reasonable expectation of privacy or institutional support when that privacy is egregiously violated with malice. The heart of the issue isn’t public or private, legal or technological, but a matter of cultural and political will: Are women’s equality, dignity, and civic parity central to our idea of democracy or not? As it stands, “misinformation,” “fake news,” and “political risk” mainly seem to matter when the manipulation of public opinion negatively affects men and their power. It isn’t even named as such when it takes the forms that primarily affect women.

As Hill herself put it in her closing statement in Congress, a legislative body with fewer than 25% women representatives, “I'm leaving, but we have men who have been accused of credible acts of sexual violence and remain in boardrooms, on the Supreme Court, in this very body, and worst of all, in the Oval Office.”



More articles by Category: Free Speech, Gender-based violence, Media, Online harassment, Politics
More articles by Tag: Non-consensual pornography, #MeToo
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Soraya Chemaly
Director, WMC Speech Project, Activist, Writer
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