Looking back at this piece, written seven years ago, the core issues that I identified then remain significant and relevant. Issues such as gendered consent, surveillance and privacy, unequal access to the Internet, gendered abuse and trolling online, and the vexed question on how to regulate social media platforms remain important issues that continue to be debated and contested in the realm of policy, research and governance. However, I will identify three thematic changes that have taken place globally, which have impacted our understanding of sexuality, technology and the Internet.
The first theme is the emergence of new culture wars across the world, including in the United States, where there has been a massive backlash against LGBTQI politics, women’s reproductive and sexual rights, and sexuality politics more broadly. This has resulted in laws aimed at tightening control over abortion in the United States, policies that target trans inclusion, and a growing backlash against identity politics and affirmative action. This political backlash has arrived at a time when right wing fundamentalist and authoritarian politics has continued to grow across the world maintaining a strong presence on online platforms and social media. This backlash is evident in attempts to remove books considered controversial from libraries in towns across the United States. A large proportion of the books that have been targeted are those related to LGBTQ+ issues. While much of this backlash has taken place in the United States, these events have important ramifications globally, including in India, given the interconnectedness of sexuality politics.
The second theme is the quantum jump in Artificial Intelligence (AI) as evidenced by ChatGPT and other platforms that have showcased the power of AI. Deep fakes (video and audio images that have been edited using AI) of celebrities that are almost impossible to tell apart from the original, have thrown up fresh challenges around regulating images, protecting identity theft, and new fresh ethical and legal questions around law enforcement. A deep fake image of the actress Rashmika Mandanna that went viral in November 2023 is an example of just how sophisticated these technologies have become, raising alarming questions around reputational damage to the victim and the potential misuse of this technology. During the 2024 election campaign, deepfakes of politicians across the political spectrum have surfaced online, including those of former Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu M Karunanidhi and J Jayalalithaa (both of whom are no longer alive). The Indian government has issued an advisory to social media companies advising them to remove misleading content and deep fake videos from their platforms and has stated that those responsible for deepfakes will be prosecuted under section 66D of the Information Technology Act.
The third theme is the growing and disproportionate power of social media platforms. These platforms are expanding their footprint in the Global South, in countries such as India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, The Philippines, Nigeria and Mexico. As more and more people in the Global South begin to access the Internet through mobile phones, there are serious questions around the ability and willingness of platforms to invest in personnel and technology that will be able to deal with the nuances of language and dialects outside of English, and make thousands of decisions around whether content should be kept up on their platforms based on the specific context in which these decisions are being made. This has led to new forms of self-regulatory mechanisms such as the Facebook Oversight Board set up by Meta that comprises of experts from across the world who take decisions on whether Facebook and Instagram’s decisions around content moderation are in conformity with international human rights standards and the platform company’s stated values. An example of this is the Oversight Board’s decision to overturn Meta’s removal of content related to the awareness of breast cancer and testicular cancer; both of which were initially taken down as violating the platform’s policies around adult nudity and sexually explicit content.
Related to the issue of platforms is the now growing interest around content circulating on end-to-end encrypted platforms such as WhatsApp that through their mass circulation through large groups have an element of publicness that has so far been underplayed in policy debates especially in Europe and the United States. As a growing proportion of the world’s users utilise these end-to-end encrypted platforms to communicate and broadcast messages, potential questions around how to regulate these without compromising end-to-end encryption are now emerging. While end-to-end encryption is a valuable tool against government and other forms of surveillance and is an important space for marginalised communities and those critical of government policy, it also provides a forum for the distribution of deepfakes, hate speech and other forms of controversial content raising issues around how such content should be regulated.
Addressing each of these challenges will require innovative approaches at the systemic level, including greater investment from social media platforms in non-English language capabilities, and greater vigilance and awareness from civil society and other online actors around how to detect and tackle deepfake technology.
Cover Image: Photo by Jay Wennington on Unsplash
