cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/54087138

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Women who take on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have long been targeted in coordinated, online sexual harassment campaigns. These campaigns are massive in scale and driven by state-linked actors in China, technology companies like Meta and OpenAI have said.

What is new is that some are pushing back by calling out the behavior and publicizing the images. This week Rome-based [human rights activist Laura] Harth went public with the images on the website of her employers, Safeguard Defenders. She told Newsweek that the shame was not hers, but her attackers’.

“I don’t identify with these images at all, and I hope that is a taboo we can break. Because that’s not you. That’s an image of the CCP,” Harth said.

As for the people—probably mostly men—running the campaigns: “It’s up to you to explain it to your wife,” she said.

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Newsweek spoke to four women who are politically active who say they have been the targets of such campaigns. They live in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy.

All were certain that the attacks come from China and increased when they engaged in campaigns or published reports, or coincided with specific events sensitive in the Chinese political calendar, they said. All want the authorities where they live to take action to stop it.

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An expert on intelligence matters told Newsweek that the situation was “classic sex kompromat”, a Russian term for material designed to entrap and discredit. One image of Su includes text in Russian.

Women are targeted in this way, because “shame is a very feminine vulnerability,” said Nathalie Vogel, a research fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C.

Previously, security agencies in repressive regimes such as East Germany or the Soviet Union used doppelgänger, or body doubles, to film or trap people, Vogel said.

“The Stasi [East German secret police] had a formidable collection of look-alikes for such operations,” she said.

“But the age of AI has revolutionized the techniques of kompromat,” Vogel said.

Canada-based political commentator and CCP critic Zang Xihong uses the online pen name Sheng Xue. She also supplied Newsweek with explicit, fake images.

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Zang said the Canadian authorities failed to help. “I went to the police station, but the police officer said they couldn’t do anything, because I am an adult.”

In the U.S. the first conviction for creating AI-generated obscene material took place in Ohio in April, following passage of the Take It Down Act last year.

The law to prosecute harmful deepfake images was championed by first lady Melania Trump. In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni posted a fake image of herself in lingerie in March to warn about the phenomenon, which she called cyberbullying. Italy legislated against AI deepfakes last year.

“I think that’s the best way to deal with it. The law,” said Zang. “But to get China to stop, to admit they’re doing it, that’s very, very difficult.”

The harassment works, Zang said. “Attacking women like this is an old tactic. It’s one reason why there are relatively few female Chinese dissidents.”

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