Most people have a general understanding of disinformation — false information that is intentionally created to cause harm. Disinformation becomes “gendered” when deliberately false information draws on common understandings of issues like masculinity, femininity and sexual violence.
Although gender-based disinformation does not receive as much attention as race-based disinformation, it’s particularly dangerous because it taps into deep-seated beliefs about our own identities.
Narratives about gender identity are also harder to fact-check than simple true or false stories.
As the Democratic Convention gets underway in Chicago, Vice President Kamala Harris is increasingly vulnerable to gender-based disinformation campaigns — if she isn’t already a victim of them.
Russian gender-based disinformation
Scholars have long understood that women politicians regularly experience misogynistic comments, but gender-based disinformation is insidious in other ways.
States like Russia target the citizens of western countries with gender-based disinformation to promote their foreign policy goals.
When Canada assumed leadership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) battle group in Latvia, Russia spread gender-based disinformation to Latvian Russian-speakers to undermine local support for Canada’s mission. These campaigns claimed that the Canadian Armed Forces were filled with homosexuals and potential rapists. The core message was that Latvians should not trust Canadians.
Recent studies have also found that Russia strategically uses bots and trolls to spread false stories about female politicians to influence public opinion before elections. If a male candidate aligns more closely with Russia’s foreign policy goals, it may use gendered narratives to discredit that candidate’s female opponent.
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This type of gender-based disinformation often inflates the credibility of male candidates by portraying women as being unqualified, overly emotional, prone to lying and unintelligent.
These disinformation campaigns use cutting-edge technology to convey the right narratives to the right people. During its interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russia used data crumbs commonly employed by internet marketers to “micro-target” social media users with select disinformation based on their specific psychological and socioeconomic markers, as well as their political beliefs.
The 2024 election campaign
Americans should be aware of an onslaught of gender-based disinformation about Harris that will likely gain momentum after this week’s Democratic National Convention.
When Hillary Clinton ran for office in 2016, little was known about gender-based disinformation. Now that authorities know and understand the disinformation tactics used during that election, Americans can prepare for the ballot box with the lessons learned from history.
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There are two disinformation tactics favoured by Russia and used in 2016 that it will likely use again in 2024.
One is to portray a candidate as inauthentic or hypocritical.
Clinton was the first female nominee of a major party and had the potential to mobilize female voters. To undermine domestic support for Clinton, Russia spread news stories that suggested that even though she was a woman, her policies belie the feminist cause, implying that real feminists should not support her.
During the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Harris was similarly targeted with disinformation after Biden announced her as his running mate. There were claims that she did not deserve to be vice president because she was merely a diversity hire and had used sex to gain power. Those claims have been repeated since she became the party’s presidential candidate.
Segmentation is the second Russian tactic. It entails polarizing society and fragmenting groups at the same time. Research shows that one of the primary goals of state-sponsored disinformation campaigns is to break apart the social fabric of a country by amplifying social, cultural and political fault lines.
Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, one study found that Russian-backed accounts on Twitter (now X) spread narratives attacking feminists, claiming that they were “man-hating” ideologues who sought to suppress men’s rights. Polarizing narratives like this were designed to create divisions between feminists and non-feminists.
At the same time, Russia sought to fragment the feminist movement. Accounts linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency posed as feminists on Twitter to critique other feminists, claiming that feminism was too white to represent black feminists or too liberal to represent conservative feminists. Although these may be valid critiques of the feminist movement, Russia instrumentally used them to divide voters who might have come together to support Clinton.
Baseless attacks on Harris
Although links to states like Russia are unclear, the media environment is already filled with gender-based disinformation about Harris.
A recent study found that among 130,000 public posts on X, Instagram and TikTok, 15 per cent of them erroneously claimed that Joe Biden called Harris a “diversity hire,” seven per cent highlighted a video of a television judge slandering her, and three per cent made scurrilous and false allegations about her sexual history. X owner Elon Musk even circulated a deep fake video of Harris confirming that Biden selected her because she is a Black woman — the “ultimate diversity hire.”
Gender-based disinformation is already part of the presidential election. Voters need to know that they are exposed to false information, and that it’s not benign. It is often constructed by states like Russia to influence elections and undermine America’s social cohesion.
Owen Wong works for the Centre for International and Defence Policy (CIDP) at Queen’s University. He holds a MINDS Targeted Engagement Grant from the Candian Deparment of National Defence to study gender-based disinformation.
