Empowering frontline workers against technologically facilitated gender-based violence

The project translates new EU digital legislation – including the Digital Services Act (DSA), the AI Act, and the Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence Directive – into concrete advocacy and support tools for frontline workers.

​

AI tools are being weaponized to scale sexual and gender-based violence. Social media platforms are increasingly abandoning safeguards and amplifying misogyny and anti-rights narratives. While digital spaces are becoming more hostile for women, legal protection and enforcement often lag behind.

​

EU rules can be hard to interpret and even harder to put into practice. CSOs are often stretched for time and resources but are expected to respond to new forms of digital harm. This project helps Nordic CSOs make sense of EU digital legislation and use it in their advocacy and survivor-support work.

​

As a cross-border collaboration, the project is led by the Nordic Digital Rights and Equality Foundation (NORDREF), in partnership with National Council of Women in Finland, Stígamót (Iceland) and the Women’s Shelter of Iceland, with additional Swedish partners joining in 2026. The project brings together legal experts, digital rights advocates, and front-line service providers to ensure that the project’s solutions are grounded in real-world CSO needs across the Nordic region.

Its core objectives are to:

​

• Help Nordic CSOs understand what the new EU digital laws mean in practice and support them in using these laws to respond to TFGBV

• Strengthen cross-Nordic collaboration and shared learning

• Develop clear, tested recommendations for CSOs and decision-makers

• ​

The project engages organizations and stakeholders across Finland, Iceland, Sweden, and the wider Nordic region. Turning EU Laws Into Action is funded by the Nordic Gender Equality Fund. The project runs from June 2025 to June 2027, concluding with a Nordic conference in Helsinki in 2027.

 

How is AI accelerating digital violence?

​

TFGBV is not new. Women have been targeted online since the earliest days of the internet, through harassment, threats, stalking, and the non-consensual sharing of intimate images. What is new is how AI is making this violence faster, easier to produce, and harder to stop.

​

AI makes sexual abuse easy to generate and hard to trace. AI tools can now create convincing images, videos, and voices in minutes. That means perpetrators no longer need technical skills to create abusive material — and they can do it at scale. Image generators and voice synthesis can be used to create fake nudes, impersonate people, or fabricate humiliating content that looks and sounds real. Because these tools are cheap, accessible, and difficult to trace, they can intensify control, isolation, and fear — including within abusive relationships.

​

Deepfake pornography is overwhelmingly used to target women. One of the most extreme examples is non-consensual deepfake sexual imagery, where someone’s face is used to simulate sexual acts without consent. According to a 2023 report by cybersecurity firm Security Hero, deepfake pornography accounts for approximately 98% of all deepfake videos online, and 99% of the targets are women. This is one of the clearest examples of how AI-driven abuse is gendered: it turns women’s bodies into material that can be manipulated, distributed, and weaponized at scale. In a 2025 review of 29 AI “undressing” apps, all could generate explicit images of women, but only 12 could do so for men.

​

Platform algorithms are feeding misogyny at scale. Most large platforms rely on recommendation algorithms designed to maximise engagement. In practice, these systems often push users towards more extreme, more polarising content, including misogynistic and anti-feminist narratives. This matters because it can normalise hostility toward women and make violent ideas feel mainstream.

​

A 2024 study at Dublin City University tracked what content was recommended to new experimental accounts on YouTube Shorts and TikTok. The researchers found that male-identified accounts were pushed masculinist, anti-feminist, and extremist content within the first 23 minutes, even when the accounts did not actively look for it. Once an account showed interest, the recommendations escalated quickly. After only a few hours of viewing, the majority of content being recommended was toxic (TikTok 76%, YouTube Shorts 78%), much of it rooted in the manosphere and promoting women’s submission. This is how algorithmic systems can contribute to radicalization: with a steady stream of content that trains users to see gender equality as a threat and women as the enemy. This aligns with broader research showing a widening political and values gap between young women and young men in many countries, with young women becoming more liberal and young men more conservative — and social media acting as a force that intensifies polarization.

​

This fits the so-called ‘great gender divergence’: a widening values gap where young women and young men are drifting further apart. In a 30-country survey, Gen Z men and women were more divided than any other generation — including on whether women’s equality has already ‘gone far enough.

​

At the same time as misogyny is amplified, feminist content is increasingly suppressed. As major platforms and tech companies adapt anti-DEI policies, moderation systems have become more hostile to feminist content and creators face disproportionate bans. For example, Women’s line (support for survivors of GBV) in Finland has talked about how hard it is for their work since Meta banned “political” ads which include ads encouraging action against violence against women.

The result is a digital environment where the people most affected by TFGBV have less room to speak, organise, or build community, and where accountability becomes harder.

​

Digital violence isn’t a side issue—it’s a frontline issue for human rights. It undermines freedom of expression, political participation, mental health, and bodily autonomy. Supporting CSOs to address TFGBV in their work is no longer optional, it's urgent.

​

This project is funded by the Nordic Gender Equality Fund.