NEW YORK — Freedom of expression advocates from UN Women, United Nations Population Fund and Association for Progressive Communications hosted the Freedom of Expression and Gender Justice panel at the UNFPA headquarters Monday to discuss innovation, technological change and education in the digital age for achieving gender equality.

The event highlighted the Agreed Conclusions of the sixty-seventh session of the Commission on the Status of Women, the principal global intergovernmental body dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. The agreed conclusion: “While technology can be used to promote women’s and girls’ full realization of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, it can also be used to perpetuate gender stereotypes and negative social norms and create vicious cycles, in which inequalities are amplified and perpetuated through digital tools.”

Irene Khan, special rapporteur with the United Nations, emphasized an intersectional approach when tackling embedded misogynistic attitudes in the digital space at both the local and global scale.

“Who puts hate onto the digital space? It’s people who are living in the dumps in the offline world,” she said. “That’s why it’s important to address this issue in two ways — one is globally, through the behavior of companies, encouraging them to adopt good practices, and the other is to work with local communities. Technology has allowed local leaders to transmit gendered prejudices, which are then amplified and spread towards women in the offline world.”

Kristina Wilfore called attention to the lack of oversight toward social media platforms for the gender-based violence rooted into their algorithms.

According to Gendered Disinformation is a national security problem, misogynistic social media users take advantage of algorithmic designs to create fake and outrageous, viral content. In 2017, “fake tweets claimed that Svitlana Zalishchuk, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, ‘promised to run naked through the streets of Kiev if the Ukrainian army lost a key battle,’” the research states.

“There are humans behind the algorithms, – this is not a fully automated system, – someone decides on what is important,” Wilfore said. “When you show them that, it doesn’t make a difference. They don’t have to change it. We can’t deal with societal bias until we have the tools managed, – until there is some corporate responsibility.”

With the rise of technology, violence against women has branched to new realms; freedom of expression is used to excuse misogynistic violence through online harassment toward women, which, in turn, spills over from the digital space and spreads to real-life violence.