AI and Sexism: The Fight Against Misogyny Online (Laura Bates)
Radical with Amol Rajan
BBC
4.5 • 919 Ratings
🗓️ 12 June 2025
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Feminist campaigner Laura Bates has fought for women's safety for over a decade. But now her battle against misogyny moved online.
She tells Amol how social media platforms are fuelling hatred against women, with algorithms promoting increasingly extreme content.
The popularity of figures like Andrew Tate, whose videos are widely available, and offensive material is being pushed to teenage boys and young men, even if they don't seek it out.
So how can it be stopped? What responsibility do the big tech companies have in combating this problem? How can they be held accountable? And what is it doing to society if young men are being radicalised in this way?
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Amol Rajan is a presenter of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. He is also the host of University Challenge on BBC One. Before that, Amol was media editor at the BBC and editor at The Independent.
Radical with Amol Rajan is a Today Podcast. It was made by Lewis Vickers with Grace Reeve and Lucy Pawle. Digital production was by David Kaplowitz and Sophie Millward. The editor is Sam Bonham. The executive producer is Owenna Griffiths.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.4 | Okay, this is it. |
| 0:06.6 | Episode one of Radical with Amol Rajin. |
| 0:10.5 | I am so excited and so grateful for your company. |
| 0:14.2 | I really do feel like I've been waiting a very, very long time for this. |
| 0:17.6 | And I think we're going to do great things together, |
| 0:20.3 | starting with a fascinating, really, |
| 0:23.5 | really revelatory conversation with Laura Bates. She is one of the most influential feminists |
| 0:28.7 | in Britain and beyond. And the conversation that we've had, which is not just a conversation about |
| 0:33.2 | tomorrow, actually, but also a conversation about today covers toxic algorithms, it covers modern |
| 0:39.0 | misogyny, and it covers the way in which social media and artificial intelligence is |
| 0:44.8 | radicalizing. And that was her word, not mine, radicalising a new generation of young men and boys |
| 0:51.6 | and often really quite young boys. There is now an awareness of let's talk about Andrew Tate. |
| 0:56.7 | We want to talk about the Manosphere stuff. |
| 0:58.8 | But what schools are horrified by and generally speaking have absolutely no awareness of |
| 1:03.8 | is the number of children in the UK now who are using this technology |
| 1:08.1 | to create pornographic deepfakes of their female peers and also of their female teachers. |
| 1:13.1 | She is sounding the alarm about how artificial intelligence is already fueling violence against women and girls. |
| 1:22.4 | And one of the points you're about to hear her make is that often these days it's the youngest boys who have the most regressive |
| 1:28.9 | and appalling views of women and that's because of technology and i should say that as a |
| 1:35.1 | broadly speaking technophile and techno optimist who lives and breathes AI who reads the books |
| 1:40.4 | about it and listens to the podcasts i was absolutely shocked about the ways in which artificial intelligence |
... |
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