Assembly Standing Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection

Good afternoon. I'll call the hearing for the Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection into session. This is an informational hearing and the Committee's hosting it. And I want to start by thanking all of our panelists today for attending and participating in today's hearing.

I especially want to thank our incredible staff of the Committee for organizing this hearing. I know that this was not an easy subject to spend time thinking about and researching, but such an important one.

So thank you and as well as the staff always from the Rules Committee, the sergeants who make it possible for us to be here, and all the Capitol support offices who help organize every hearing, especially these informational hearings. Before we welcome our first panel, I do want to provide a warning to anyone listening or watching or present.

The subject of the hearing and the comment contents of the background paper, which was published online and is available, do contain discussions of extreme violence, sexual assault, and violent hatred towards women and girls. The topic is not necessarily suitable for everyone and could be upsetting or traumatizing to individuals.

I want to ask that those of you both in attendance and watching remotely take care when engaging with these important but potentially upsetting issues.

The purpose of our hearing today is to gain a better understanding of how women and girls are being attacked in online spaces by boys and men, whether it is through the sharing of non consensual intimate images, either real or fake, threatening women with rape or death for expressing their opinions online, dragging them out of multiplayer online games, or a number of other creative ways that men have found to harass and harm women.

As was noted in the background paper, although there's often an attack that it isn't always men that are causing this harm to women, the data proves that it is overwhelmingly the case, and so we will be discussing it in that regard, although we do acknowledge that it isn't always the case.

As part of this, we'll Explore how Section 230 of the Federal Communications Decency act of 1996, which provides immunity to online platforms for the speech of third parties, has enabled online abuse.

In addition, we'll explore how and why men and boys are becoming radicalized and adopting the rhetoric and beliefs of male supremacy, which the Southern Poverty Law center has identified as extremist and dangerous. To explain this difficult subject matter, we are joined by nationally recognized experts in their fields.

Our first panel includes Professor Noble, who is here in person, a Distinguished Scholar, Macarthur Fellow, and Professor of Gender Studies, African American Studies and Information Studies at UCLA, always Happy to have a UC Professor showing the amazing abilities that our UC system provides.

We have writer Moira Donegan, who is also here in person, who is an opinion columnist at the Guardian, where she covers gender politics and the law. Ms. Donegan is currently serving as the writer in residence in the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University.

And finally joining us remotely is attorney Carrie Goldberg, the founder of a victim rights law firm specializing in fighting for survivors of technology facilitated sexual violence. Her firm has litigated several high profile cases involving Section 230 immunity. I also want to thank my colleagues for being here. Assembly Members Pellerin and Irwin.

At the conclusion of each panel, we'll have discussion and question from Members as they would like, and we'll also set aside time for public comment. At the end, I want to see if either of my colleagues have anything they want to add. Sure, go ahead.

Well, I just want to thank you for conducting this hearing today and just reading through the materials. This was something that was really shocking to me and so I'm looking forward to learning from all of you today. So thank you.

Thank you, Assemblymember. Okay, Professor Noble, when you're ready. Where's Mimi?

I'm assuming this is where I should sit? I don't know. Well, thank you so much. Thank you, Madam Chair and honorable Members of this Committee, for your time and commitment to studying the harms that women, children and vulnerable populations experience online.

And I have to tell you that normally I would give this talk with images and I would speak a little more extemporaneously, but it's actually such a difficult conversation for me that this time I prepared scripted remarks. And I'm happy to provide these to you after the hearing, too.

For the past 15 years, I've been a scholar of the Internet and I study the worst effects of networked computing and digital technology on society. My hope is that research stemming from our center at UCLA can lead to better public policy and consumer protections from harm.

Today, I'll be opening the testimonies with a high level overview of the landscape that allows for the impact of violence against women on the Internet, which of course is not strictly contained to social media, texting and messaging, or video and image based violence on screens.

But that most certainly has real world effects that require public policy and consumer protections from companies and technologies that enable and facilitate said violence in all its forms.

Today you'll hear from other esteemed colleagues with greater details and traumas, and together we hope to paint a picture for you of the very important role you play as leaders in our nation.

We know that as public policy protections are enacted in California, we can help lead the nation in providing evidence based policy that improves the lives of all Members of our society.

I want to first start by distinguishing some of today's remarks about violence against women and girls as unique and different from online violence protections for children writ large.

Let me briefly say here that there's been a lot of federal attention on protecting our most vulnerable children, many of whom are black or indigenous children, children of color, children of immigrants and queer and Trans children. Many of the tactics of harassment and bullying that children experience are things that women and non binary people experience too.

We need public policy that provides the most robust consumer, civil and human rights protection protections possible for all Americans, maybe starting with California. As the leader in the United States, we are bombarded with vitriol and hate against women and girls. From politicians and community leaders, to athletes, entertainer and entertainers, very few women and girls are exempt.

The normalization of hate and abuse of women and girls is so pervasive that it's considered sport in tabloids, on social media, and even made spectacle by people who occupy the highest offices of of the nation. Fundamentally, violence against women and girls is profitable.

And that is central to the business models of the Internet that systematically extract billions of dollars from user generated content and now AI generated content without any meaningful regulatory oversight in the United States. And I wrote about this. I started studying what was happening online, kind of in the most banal technologies, which were search engines.

Over 15 years ago, I was writing about how women and girls are algorithm discriminated against. In that book, Algorithms of Oppression is unfortunately still as relevant today as it was when I was writing it as a dissertation in 2010.

But beyond profitability, I believe that the normalized violence against women is also one of the most pervasive anti democratic dimensions of our society.

What we need to understand about the suppression of women and girls voices and participation from public life is the tremendous impact this has on excluding our leadership, our perspectives and our engagement in our communities, our workplaces, our educational institutions, in our voting rights, and even in our homes.

The purposeful intimidation, threats and weaponization of the Internet to push women and girls into total submission is a massive threat to our civil and human rights. And the Internet is one of the most effective weapons ever invented to both empower and silence us.

Violence against women online, particularly by men, is a strategy to silence and erase women and girls from their fullest potential and possibilities. Often speech online is characterized as free and unfettered. Yet this is patently false.

There are a host of practices on the Internet by tech companies that give more speech or less speech to people based on algorithmic amplification, content moderation practices and monetization. Monetization of certain types of content. I would point you to the work of

Dr. Marianne Franks, Professor of law, who's written extensively about the First Amendment protections that are often adjudicated by the courts and tech companies in favor of reckless speech that empowers racist and sexist speech against women and minorities, rather than fearless speech that favors speaking truth to power.

I have personally witnessed content moderation workers adjudicate content in this manner, making it almost impossible for women who are targeted with violent images and messages to fight back.

I've also written about this, particularly as it affects black women and girls and their attempts to refuse racist stereotyping and the lack of empathy extended to them, or as they litigate against online publishers who actively facilitate millions of people trolling and threatening them.

While some might believe that the harassment and exploitation of famous black women and girls is somehow less consequential by virtue of their fame, online platforms create harmful consequences for all women. Dr.

Moya Bailey has coined this term massage noir to describe the specific intersection of racism and sexism that black women and girls experience, which is deeply destructive because it is also used to buttress white male supremacy. And it uniquely leaves black women and girls even more impacted than other women.

In the case of social media, not only has trolling been emotionally and psychologically destructive for countless women and girls, it is financially lucrative for the abusers who demonize and dehumanize us. And it has no regard for the toll on our mental health Internet. Excuse me, on our.

On our mental health Internet and media companies that traffic in stereotyping and whipping up negative sentiment toward women, especially women and girls of color. And I really would extend this to, you know, any kind of not CIS male identity is often really could be encompassed in this.

This really drives massive amounts of engagement, which translates to big profits for the platforms. In 2018, Amnesty International reported that while all women are targets of online abuse and violence, women of color were 34% more likely to be mentioned in abusive or problematic tweets than white women.

Further, Black women are 84% more likely than white women to be mentioned in such damaging and hateful tweets. Big tech companies have been negligent in the design and management of their platforms. I could go on and on and on about that, but I will try to keep this brief.

Because there will be great examples, unfortunately, and by great I mean absolutely horrific and horrible examples that come from the other experts. But I will say that both traditional media conglomerates and Internet media companies draw users into their web of vile disregard for women through the casual and constant use of dog whistles and entrenched stereotypes.

Hateful speech and sexist behavior toward women is a heinous and enduring practice that has grave consequences, not just for the rich and famous, but for everyday women who have to live, work, and try to thrive in racist and misogynistic workplaces and communities whose hostility to our very existence is persistently and routinely normalized.

And I feel that speaking to a group of women politicians who could know better Grassroots response to violence against women online has been led by a number of organizations, and I'm proud to be a board Member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, for example, which worked hard to help ensure passage of federal legislation such as the SHIELD act, an amendment to the Violence Against Women Reauthorization act of 2021 that provides urgently needed protection against an egregious form of cybersexual abuse that disproportionately affects women and girls.

The SHIELD act, originally introduced in 2019, is a bipartisan measure that addresses the devastating and often irreparable impact that the unauthorized disclosure of private, sexually explicit visual imagery can have.

This impact includes loss of employment and educational opportunities, harassment, stalking, threats of sexual assault, deterioration of intimate and family relationships, and psychological trauma severe enough to lead many to contemplate and some to lose their lives to suicide. No one is a greater advocate for these women than Carrie Goldberg.

According to the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, non consensual intimate imagery, or ncii, sometimes referred to as non consensual pornography, has proliferated in the age of the digital due to the ubiquitous presence of virtually undetectable recording devices, the instantaneous communication possibilities afforded by the Internet and social media, and increasingly common cyber attacks that allow hackers and abusers to access private information.

Like other forms of domestic violence and sexual abuse, rates of cyber sexual abuse have increased during the COVID 19 pandemic and in 2020. For example, the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative crisis helpline logged 380.39% increase in calls.

I'm also citing CCRI here when I say that women are almost twice as likely to be targeted for non consensual pornography and make up the majority of victims exploited on so called revenge porn websites.

Photos and videos of their most private moments, often created or obtained without their knowledge, are also distributed through social media, messaging applications and emails. Not only is non consensual pornography a common form of intimate partner violence, but it always plays a role in sexual assault, sex trafficking and sexual harassment.

Domestic abusers threaten their partners with exposure to prevent them from leaving or reporting the abuse. Rapists record their attacks for personal gratification and to further torment their victims. And as you can imagine, all of this ultimately leads to the chilling effect on women and girls freedom of expression and deters their participation in professional, political and civil life.

But this is also not limited to actual digital images being used to harass women and girls. Scholars like Dr. Olivia Snow, who works in our center at UCLA, have written about generative AI technologies like stable diffusion that generate deep fakes and hyper sexualized images of women and girls.

I'll refrain from saying much more about deepfakes and defer to other experts who will speak today, but I will underscore that this practice is also racialized and that across the technologies we study, women and girls of color are more likely to be victimized and disproportionately harmed.

Because we live in a profoundly discriminatory society, there are no regulations that stop companies from making technologies that are used as weapons against women and girls.

Most women and girls cannot afford to use pathways available, which is lawsuits against companies that make it possible to algorithm algorithmically amplify violence against them or that build a culture of violence and hate for women. Women who are defamed or whose reputations are damaged have little to no recourse.

In practical terms, we see how Internet platforms can be powerfully mobilized to these ends. What is important to understand about online abuse and violence against women is that it effectively pushes women out of public life, out of social, economic and political participation, and it suppresses our right to freedom of speech and the right to assemble.

It is an effective and scalable way to force and bully women out of sight and out of power. I believe one of the most important things that public policymakers can do is create pathways for repair for women and girls who are victims of violence online.

There are a number of incredibly important interventions that we could explore, which includes restitution by companies for women and girls who are victims of technologies that facilitate harm against us, greater civil rights protections, and of course investments in more research to help develop evidence based public policy solutions.

In closing, just today Aliyah Dazashir released her new book to those who have confused you to Be a Words as Violence and Stories of Women's Resistance Online that I encourage you to read to understand the potent and personal details of what it's like to have your life upended by online violence.

May we all find the compassion and strength to keep doing the things, the right things, in fact, in the face of injustice. I want to thank you to the honorable Members of this Committee for taking time to learn about the important issue of online violence against women and girls. My colleagues at UCLA and I look forward to helping you in any way possible.

Thank you so much. And I will say the Committee is not all female, so I would invite our male colleagues to join us in 444. This is equally as important for you to hear. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. Yes. And he sits on the Committee. ... Can you join us?

You can stay because there might be questions, if you don't mind. Unless you're doing.

When you're ready.

Let me make sure that this is about where it should be. Thank you so much. Thank you to Madam Chair, to my co-panelists, Professor Noble and Ms. Goldberg, both of whom I greatly admire, and to the Members of this Committee for taking time to think about this issue today.

My name is Moira Donegan and I am the writer in Residence at Stanford's Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research and an opinion columnist at the Guardian, where I cover gender and politics.

And in my work as a writer and advocate, I have become familiar not just with the phenomenon of image based sexual abuse, but also with the discourses around it, several of which seem to taxonomize the different types of image weaponization based on the various ways that offenders obtain these images that they then go on to use for abusive purposes.

So there is, for instance, the predominant case of the non consensual distribution online of images that were initially consensually shared in private with the offender, often a victim's current or former romantic partner. This is a form of image based abuse that is colloquially, though imprecisely known as revenge porn.

Then there is also the non consensual sharing of images that were taken clandestinely without the victim's consent and knowledge in practices called upskirting, down blousing or spy Cam Pornography.

Sometimes offenders will film or photograph a sexual assault on an unconscious, inebriated or otherwise non consenting woman or girl, sharing the images with their friends or putting them online in the aftermath of the attack, and other times in a process colloquially called sextortion.

Nude or lewd images are coercively or fraudulently obtained from victims through threats or deceit, with offenders then going on to either distribute the images without consent or threaten to do so in less money or more images are delivered to them.

And finally there is the growing genre of AI or deepfake pornographic images forged using generative software and often indistinguishable from genuine images that, unlike other that, excuse me, like other forms of image based abuse, are both created and distributed without the subject's consent.

All these varieties of image based abuse are facilitated by new and often still poorly understood forms of media and technology, and I have found in my own work on this issue that this novelty can be distracting.

Many conversations about the prevalence of image based sexual abuse cast the practices as new or even as an exclusive product of these technologies. But the use of images to harass, humiliate and harm women and girls in sexual terms predates the Internet.

Non consensual pornography is older than the dedicated message boards where men and boys congregate to share it. Forged pornography is older than AI. The practice of using images to degrade women and girls on the basis of their gender is not new.

What is new is that the Internet and its technologies enable a greatly expanded impact for this abuse through the increased speed and scale of the distribution of these images, and in the case of AI pornography, through what is often the new undetectability of the forgery itself, making the forged pornographic images indistinguishable from genuine ones.

So when we talk about image based sexual abuse, then what we are talking about is a very old form of sexual degradation and violation that has taken on new significance as emerging technologies.

And the growing move of social and professional life into digital spaces allows this kind of abuse to spread further and faster, to remain available online longer, continuing to harm victims, and to become more and more detrimental to women and girls. Dignity, prosperity, access to work and education, social thriving and mental health.

So when we talk about the spread and the prevalence of image based sexual abuse online, I think it's important to understand that this is a broader social phenomenon that we get tripped up conceptually, discursively and in regulatory terms because of its new form, not because of its new phenomenology.

The prevalence of image based sexual abuse is difficult to accurately measure, both because of the changing definitions and research methodologies associated with the issue, and because stigma and a broad sense of impunity for the perpetrators of sexual and gender based violence discourage victims from reporting.

One study of American victims of image and sexual based abuse found that 73% of victims of this kind of violence do not turn to anyone for help.

But there is anecdotal evidence that the prevalence of this form of abuse is in fact becoming greater as AI tools become cheaper and more accessible, and as small cameras become more and more undetectable. And the ubiquity of cell phones further the sense of impossibility of preventing ubiquitous surveillance.

Researchers at the AI monitoring company Sensify have estimated that as many as 90% of deep fit videos online are non consensual pornography. And that of these, 95% feature images of non consenting girls and women.

So after high profile incidents of viral deep fake pornography featuring the likenesses of pop star Taylor Swift and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortese, this has largely been imagined as a problem impacting famous women. And this would be bad enough, creating an additional dignity tax on women's fame, ambition and participation in public life.

But like other kinds of non consensual pornography deepfakes are not limited to the famous. They are increasingly victimizing those ordinary women and girls who live and work entirely out of the public eye.

Non consensual deepfake pornography of students was found to be circulating just last year among student bodies in the Beverly Hills, Laguna Beach and Los Angeles United School Districts. More traditional forms of image based sexual abuse are even more widespread. What do we know about why offenders target women this way?

Studies of the perpetrators of image based sexual abuse are methodologically fraught. It is hard to get these guys to talk about what they're doing in a way where you can be sure that they are honest.

But one investigation by a researcher at Michigan State University found that perpetrators cite three types of motivation to show off, to bully, and to seek revenge. The first of these, the desire to show off, underscores that sharing non consensual pornography is a way for men to achieve status among other men.

The man or boy who distributes these non consensual images, the hopes that in doing so he will bond with the men around him and convince them of his virility at a woman's expense. This element of the abuse is often experienced by victims as an acute betrayal.

The perpetrator, often her friend, partner, colleague or classmate, is frequently trading on what she thought to be their shared bond of intimacy and affection and using it to hurt her for his own narcissistic gain.

This is frequently not, as is commonly imagined, merely a betrayal by just one man in her life perpetrated among a group of strangers, but in fact a coordinated effort between several different men she knew. This was the case for Caitlin Cannon, now the Vice President of the victim advocacy group March Against Revenge Porn, who subpoenaed a.

Excuse me, who sought a subpoena against a website that was hosting intimate images of her that she had sent to a former boyfriend.

She found that the IP address associated with the account that had uploaded those images of her was not, as she had initially assumed, the boyfriend she had sent those images to, but in fact a man who had been her teacher in high school.

But those other two perpetrator motivations to bully and to seek revenge point to a more acute animus. Non consensual pornography often aims to punish women for a perceived grievance men have against them, or to discipline a perceived transgression on women's part.

It is wielded against women and girls who break up with men in whom they are no longer romantically interested, enforcing a punishment for defying men's wishes it is wield against women who speak or behave in ways that men disagree with, enforcing a punishment for defying men's standards.

In all cases, the message sent by non consensual pornography is one of men's social domination over women. The message is that women and men are not equals, but that women must defer to men and that those who do not will be humiliated and made to suffer. And the infliction of this suffering is very much deliberate.

Offenders do not merely distribute these images behind their victim's back. They frequently make demands.

One 2017 US study of intimate partner I'm sorry of image based sexual abuse found that 51% of perpetrators demanded more sexual photos as a condition of not releasing the ones that they already had, 42% demanded of their victims that they return to a relationship that the victim had tried to end or leave, and 26% demanded that in exchange for not releasing the images, the victim meet with the person who is abusing them, usually for sex.

In non consensual pornography, offenders sexualize their targets specifically with the intent and the effect of degrading them, of injuring their dignity, of suggesting that they are unsuited for professional positions, educational attainment or the respect of their peers, and of provoking in their victims shame, distress and fear.

This is the intent of non consensual pornography and it is frequently successful. For those targeted, the impacts can be acute. Studies of the victims of non consensual pornography indicate that these women suffer severe mental health effects including anxiety, depression, post traumatic stress disorder, suicidal ideation and difficulty trusting loved ones.

They are at increased risk of substance abuse, eating disorders and self harming behaviors.

They are more likely to lose or leave their jobs and they are more likely to experience major disruptions in their education both due to the direct results of the abuse such as being unable to attend work or school for fear of humiliation and harassment related to the images and also due to the indirect effects of the abuse such as psychological distress.

I would like to emphasize that the perpetration of this kind of abuse prohibits women's exercise of their freedom to access the public sphere and often, frequently according to victims, also inhibits their exercise of free sexual expression as many of the victims feel that they are not able to have consensual private relationships that include image sharing in a world where this sort of abuse is possible and treated with great impunity.

Image based sexual abuse has become a General risk faced by women and girls and there are no steps that they can take to reliably prevent their own victimization before it happens. It is important, I think, to acknowledge the technology here serves an accelerant for an underlying social problem.

That is the sexualized contempt of women wielded as a weapon against them to punish and prevent their full access to public life.

It is also vital to assert that there must be no hierarchy of image based sexual abuse based on how the offenders came into possessions of the images, be it through consensually shared photographs or entirely forged digital works.

Because there is no behavior, sexual or otherwise, the woman can engage in that can mitigate the wrongness of non consensual pornography. That's the moral argument for treating all forms of ISBA as egregious.

But there is also a practical one, because in the age of AI, there's no prescription for women's behavior, no matter how puritanical, that can reliably protect them from becoming victims of this abuse.

It is not sufficient to tell women not to take or share nude photographs when these technologies, along with older fashioned lower tech forms of coercion force, enable abusive men to generate such images without women's participating in their creation at all.

It is time to stop telling women to change their behavior to prevent men's abuse and time to seek out ways to make sure that men stop abusing. Thank you all very much for your time.

Thank you so much for that. I have to say it was interesting when you said nothing about this abuse is new, it predates any of the technologies we're talking about today.

I think the backgrounder did a very good job of talking about the way the law teaches, treats these technologies differently, such that that abuse is now different because before the dawn of the Internet there was publisher liability for anyone who distributed this under Section 230. That is no longer true. Right.

So we've, I think the distinction is not in the abuse or in the ability to distribute. It is how the law treats that distribution. That I think is one of the points we're trying to carry today. And that is the perfect segue, if I do say so myself.

To our next speaker who is joining us virtually, and that is attorney Carrie Goldberg.

Hi everybody, my name is Carrie Goldberg. Thank you, Madam Chair and Members of the Committee. I am so honored to get to testify and I wish I could join my other brilliant panelists. I just am so lucky to have Moira and Sophia as allies and inspirations.

I think that Moira is one of the most courageous journalists of this century and Sophia is just. Her brain is a national treasure. So it's an honor and privilege to Be here today with my co panelists.

And also I want to say that the background paper for this hearing today is one of the most well conceived documents that I've ever read in terms of really contextualizing all of the horrors of the last couple decades. And it's just, it's great. So huge shout out to the authors of that.

Also, you know, California has been such a frontrunner for innovations when it comes to holding tech platforms accountable. The last time that I got to testify in California was for the passage of Tyler's Bill, which limited the sale of sodium nitrite to house, stopping it from being sold to households.

We represent 28 families of deceased children to whom Amazon sold this chemical and California was the leader in stopping those sales. And I also, you know, we got a lot of traction separately from California's age appropriate design code, which now has a version of that law. I know another, the destiny of that law is another story.

But all that to say I'm really super excited to be here and I think what I'm going to do is just talk about some of my cases and some of the legal challenges that that I faced.

I started my law firm 11 years ago, the very year of Gamergate and the year that the fappening happened where a lot of celebrities accounts were hacked and their nudes were leaked. And those two things, pardon me if my dogs get a little active, those two things, one second really kind of changed the discourse.

Before that, like the media really didn't even want to publish articles that had the word porn in them and suddenly they were willing to talk about revenge porn. Stop. This doesn't happen when panelists are invited to attend in person, does it? Sorry, it's witching hour for them.

So anyways, so I discovered section 230 because I was representing so many victims of what was then called revenge porn. And there were all these websites and search engines that were making a lot of money off of people's nudes being circulated.

And I came from a litigation background and I was like, well, why are we not holding these platforms liable for the intentional emotional distress that they're creating for victims? And then I discovered this law that went into effect in 1995 that basically has been interpreted in such a bloated way as to immunize the entire Internet tech community.

So my first large case, and I'm going to talk about some cases where my clients were actually men and boys, but the cases really have a lot of impact because the harms that happened to my clients happen even more frequently to girls.

And the way that these courts have treated the cases have had huge ongoing impact for women and girls as well. But my first case where I really went up against Section 230 was in a case that I filed in 2017 called Herrick v. Grindr.

And I represented a gay man whose ex boyfriend was maliciously using Grindr and creating all these fake profiles and then having direct message conversations with strangers and sending them to my client's home.

In the profiles, he would have pictures of my client, sometimes, like, on all fours, and make it look like my client was interested in sex with these strangers. And then. And then these strangers would come to his home, to his job, and over a thousand people came in person.

Grindr, which is a dating app, said that they had no technique, technological ability to ban an abusive user. So it's a dating app that said that they cannot ban users.

And in my brain, I was like, well, it is so foreseeable that a hookup app is going to sometimes have malicious users who are rapists or predators or stalkers. And if there's not been a feature designed into it that bans malicious users, then it's a defective product.

And at the time, there'd never been any claims against online service providers where they were treated as products. Back then, the. All the discourse was, these are services. You can't sue them for products. And so I thought this actually, you know, we're not treating Grindr as a. As a publisher.

We're treating them as a product that isn't working because it's unreasonably dangerous. And so we brought this forward, and the case got thrown out. We appealed, appealed, appealed, and it became case law on the East Coast in the Second Circuit, basically, that as long as content was the.

Was like, as long as the harm stemmed from a user's content, then the platform would be immune from liability, which is probably the most bloated interpretation of Section 230 almost to date. Although there's been some very bad case law recently that I'll get into.

But the idea, though, is that so much consumer protection stems from this idea that plaintiffs who've been injured, anybody who's been injured, whether you've been hit by a car or a door, falls off of an airplane, like, if there's an injury, that we all have the right to sue, no matter how much more powerful or wealthy or omniscient.

Omnipotent the defendant is, we can sue them. And it's. I just consider it the great equalizer. And that Section 230 has really just changed it because there's this whole industry that has just grown in your guys backyard because they haven't ever had to be accountable to their billions and billions of users.

Fast forward a couple years, had a client who at age 11 was matched with a predator on an app called Omegle. And Omegle was an Oregon based company that just matches strangers for livestream chatting. And the two main populations that it matches are children and adult men.

And foreseeably there's a lot of sexting that happens and sex livestreaming that happens. So I once again use that same sort of product liability theory against Omegle.

And it worked in the District of Oregon and it has continued to succeed in cases that we have against Snap relating to them facilitating drug dealers, in cases against Google Meta, TikTok and Snap relating to them addicting children. And so now that theory has kind of begun to work.

But I'm really interesting interested right now in just the liability when it comes to dating apps. And that's one area where the defendants, the platforms, are getting all the benefits of Section 230 immunity and not getting sued. And it's made it so that they're just not moderating content and letting serial abusers on their platform.

We have a case right now against Hinge that we're developing where a serial rapist, a cardiologist in Denver named Stephen Matthews, was using Hinge and other Match Group products.

Match Group, by the way, has almost a monopoly on dating apps and in my opinion has not just revolutionized how we date and mate and those kinds of rituals in our society, but it has also revolutionized rape.

Because there are studies, including one from in Utah that says that the nature of sexual assaults has really, really changed because of dating apps. And sexual assaults are much more violent when they're happening within like the first day of a dating app.

Because there's just not those same kinds of situational checks and balances that people have when they're meeting through families, friends or the community. So this is a case where Dr. Matthews is now facing, I think 157 years in jail for his serial drugging and raping of women in, in the Denver area that he met through Hinge.

Hinge knew the first report to hinge was in 2020, in September of 2020. And they continued to welcome him onto their platform for years to come.

So I really think when we're thinking about, you know, some of the ways that we could be restraining tack through legislation, I think that dating Apps is a really important way to go. We also have, there's important research about how frequently children are using dating Apps.

And we have a case against Grindr where they were welcoming children to their app. And one of our children, one of our clients, was raped by four different men over four consecutive days. And Grindr, of course, has claimed Section 230 immunity. And the district court and the Ninth Circuit, as of last week, have given Grindr full immunity.

Is Congress not amending Section230? How is Congress not amending Section230? Sorry, I thought my mic was question and I'd like to just wrap up by saying one thing about that. I was in front of the U.S. Senate last week where there was discussion, there's been discussion for years about amending Section 230.

I personally am of the mindset that litigation ought to be the way we resolve this and that a sensible reading of the black and white language of Section 230 ought to roll it back. But it's not happening so far. But there are certain bills that are, that are being thrown around.

And one of them, you know, we have the Earn it act and Defiance, and they look at deepfakes and revenge porn. And there's one called Stop csam, which is, it's an interesting situation because it was originally created to stop CSAM. It's 100, like 50 pages long.

And there was a cause of action, so a civil remedy for victims when it was first introduced. There was a negligence standard where victims had to show that the platform was negligent in keeping up revenge porn and that they knew about it.

The Bill has been reintroduced and then suddenly it was a recklessness standard, which is a higher standard. The Bill then was reintroduced a second, third time, and suddenly there was an actual knowledge standard where the platform had to be actually knowledgeable about every single incident of child sexual abuse material.

They had to have deliberately kept it up and they had a defense of impossibility so they could claim that it was impossible for them to take down child sexual abuse material. That was the defense.

And so suddenly this Stop CSAM Bill, in my perspective, that was supposed to be a pro victim Bill, had become anti victim because it created this absolutely impossible standard to meet.

And so my message to you brilliant legislators in this room is that as you get input, not just from victims like you're doing today, but as you get input from your neighbors in Silicon Valley about some of the, the brave legislative initiatives that you want to advance, little tiny tweaks of language, you know, the difference between A recklessness standard and an actual knowledge standard might seem super inconsequential, but they can actually make it so that it's a Huger obstacle for a victim who wants to sue to overcome than even Section 230, in my opinion.

There's a, there's a movement right now from big tech to create new causes of action that preempt anything else that victims could ever sue under because they're scared that there is going to be a rollback of Section 230. And so they're, they're doing some advanced preparation.

And I conclude just with another expression of gratitude for including me and also a total willingness to ever look over any bills that, that you have. I'm in the trenches every day applying legislation, applying like, I'm sorry, I'm in the trenches every day litigating.

And so I have a pretty good sense of how a Bill and how language would impact a victim. Thank you.

Thank you. I actually thought my mic was off and I made that comment about Congress, although I do really believe it.

But it's interesting that you say that they say the court should fix it because as a former litigator, now lawmaker, it's my opinion that if the courts are misinterpreting the intent of the Legislature, it is the Legislature's job to clarify the law.

So I would say that if 230 interpretations of the court have gone farther than Congress intended, they should act. But I know that Assembly Wicks has some questions before she has to leave.

Thank you, Chair, Madam Chair. And to everyone who presented today, I'm just sitting here like getting enraged as you all are talking. So that's the vibes up here from the dais, but thank you. I wrote the age appropriate design code. I also wrote AB 1394 which is targeting CSAM.

And so I've lived in this space of really trying to push our social media platforms and our online companies as aggressively as we can. And you all laid out some both horrifying individual stories, but also the statistics. And I'm the mom of an 8 year old and 4 year old little girls.

And so when I'm looking at this, I'm thinking about their future and the fact that 25% of 9 to 12 year old kids will have had explicit sexual conversations with people they believe to be adults. That's unacceptable. Right? And that's just a small piece of a larger unfortunate fabric that our young people are living in.

And as they grow into becoming women, it doesn't get that much easier. In light of all of that, I think we're constantly trying to figure out how we can push the envelope in California. This issue to date has been very bipartisan, which I'm incredibly thankful for.

I will say this Committee, in this, I'm now in my seventh year, we all come to this, or at least we have in years past.

And I hope this continue to be the same thing really as parents trying to figure out the problem and how to have the right solutions and then we run smack DAB into Section 230. That is a constant issue for us as we think about whether it's anything with regard to regulation in this space. We cannot regulate content.

There's freedom of speech issues there. Can we regulate design choices? Are there other ways we can regulate?

So I would just love to get your all's thoughts on what are the tangible, concrete things that we can do as a Legislature, as a legislative body, as a state in the face of Section 230, assuming it's not going to get amended, repealed, fixed, that we continue to push the ball forward to keep both our children and our adults safe online.

Well, I think one of the things that's been so dangerous is the flattening of the word content. And we need so much disambiguation of a word like content so that we can legislate and do the kind of work that you want to do and that we all want you to do, quite frankly.

So what you have for example, right now in terms of platforms having immunity from, let's say, content that moves through their platforms is that content could be ccm. That content could be an evidence based scientific study published by UCLA or Berkeley. It could be photos that you send to your kids grandparents.

It could be racist propaganda that's generated from another country. Everything gets flattened under the word content. And I think that seems to be a place that could be, that could serve as a powerful site of disambiguation because there are things that are illegal, child sexual exploitation is illegal and many of the things that Carrie talked about also.

So I think this would be a place where we could bring expertise to the force, greater definitions around that.

Of course we know we have mountains of evidence to prove that the, that the platforms are making adjudication decisions all the time, all over the world, everywhere that they do business, they are moderating and making basically brand driven decisions or trust and safety decisions that are demanded by their clients, the people who pay them.

And that of course has been the impetus for the entire trust and safety movement, has been companies like Procter and Gamble. Who say, I don't want my Pampers ad to run right next to a neo Nazi or some type of misogynistic content on YouTube.

So this seems like a no brainer place where we could do more and we have a lot of research.

I would also just offer that this hearing I think is a wonderful, and I know you've had many hearings, but I would just say marrying up those scholars and journalists who are doing the deep investigations around the country especially, we have a lot of phenomenal researchers here in California who could get in the trenches with you, so to speak, on this.

I mean, to me, this is the best use of taxpayer dollars in terms of funding our public universities and private who work on these issues and bringing that evidence and research to bear in some of that disambiguation.

Thank you. I don't know, Kerry, if you have anything you want to add?

Sure, I'll add. One thing is, you know, I think that I'm really interested in the issue of age regulation.

It's a controversial thing and I think, you know, when it comes to companies like Grindr, where there's actual research that says 50% of sexually active queer boys who, that they meet their first sexual partner on Grindr, so their first sexual partner is an adult that they meet on Grindr, to me, that's a really big public health issue.

And I believe that there's probably also a ton of research or statistics somewhere about the ubiquity of underage girls that are also on dating apps and are inevitably being matched with, with adults. And there is age verification products that are used in the gaming industry, particularly like the online gambling.

And a lot of tech companies act like it would be this insurmountable obstacle, but they're actually, you know, cheap, accessible methods that these companies could be using. I think we want to be careful about which companies and which industries we choose.

The other thing, you know, if we're kind of looking about at ways to be regulating without being confronted by Section 230 or the First Amendment. Another thing to consider is that marketplaces are not treated the same way as online as other online service providers.

So there can be regulation of what places like the App Store, Google Play, Amazon, Sell. And so, you know, there are certain apps that, you know, like nudify apps. There's no reason that, you know, the App Store and Google Play should be making money off of, you know, unreasonably dangerous products like that.

Certainly we want to accept it in brick and mortar stores.

Thank you. I also, I mean, some of our Books said something about First Amendment. And I think that I just.

One of the things that drives me crazy about the claim around First Amendment and social media companies is that if I, in the parking lot of a mall, allowed more speech from one speaker than another, that would be a violation of the First Amendment.

That is what the public square requires, is that everybody gets an equal ability to speak. That isn't true on our social media companies because of the algorithms. So it isn't free speech.

Like, I think just need to be really honest about that, that our traditional understanding of free speech in the public square is very, very different than what is happening on these social media companies.

And so I just don't think it's a fair comparison to say, because I think the original Facebook, where it was a timeline and it was literally just like if your aunt was the last person to post about their cat, that's what you saw. That was very different than what we're seeing today.

Just a reminder that the original Facebook was a hot or not Apple for women at Harvard, where they were ranked whether they were hot or not.

So just in terms of the origin stories of some of these social media companies as well, they have an origin in this kind of phenomenon that Maura was talking about, which is ranking women's hotness or value in our society. And I would agree that we could also look at it this way.

Any platform that has to engage in moderation immediately is in violation of their own alleged First Amendment claim. If you moderate content, then it's not a free speech platform. Yeah.

Did.

Have any questions before you leave?

Zero, wow. I mean, this is a lot. This is really just shocking and raging. I just can't believe this is happening. And reading through these papers, I'm very unfamiliar with this online platform of people interacting.

And I'm just wondering, as these video games become more interactive and more realistic, I mean, I read that you can actually wear a vest to actually feel what is happening to you virtually. I mean, how can we amend our laws to recognize that in game sexual assault has real world psychological impacts?

Carrie, they're all looking at you.

Well, I think that when we're talking about situations where there's AI that's infused into video games and somebody could be struck or attacked or groped in the, in a way that is physical, then suddenly that, that, you know, that's, in my perspective as a plaintiff's attorney, that's not, that's not just a virtual attack, that's a physical attack.

The issue though is, is trying to figure out, you know, they're always going to be bad actors, but it's the fact that, you know, platforms are making money off of this kind of conduct and actually monetizing it at scale that, you know, makes us kind of figure out like, how do we hold them accountable because.

Because they're the ones that are enabling it. And you know, I like, I think that there probably is a way that, you know, to regulate the gaming platforms.

If there's some sort of way that a physical attack could physically be felt by a victim, I'm sure that could be put into writing in a way that would, I think, could probably circumvent some of the issues with Section 230. I'd be interested in taking a stab at it.

Yeah, I want to add to that, Carrie, that we've had a lot of evidence for a long time of the neurological physical health crises that everything from tech workers, people who moderate content, people who work in Amazon warehouses, I mean, you could name many, many different types of technologies where, and technology companies where people are physically harmed that far predate being harmed in these kind of new video game or kind of prosthetic ways.

So again, this is a place where we could, I think, have the kinds of frameworks of legislation the way we would about being harmed in the workplace, at school, in the home, you know, where violence, where it can be measured and we understand it is happening in many places.

We don't interpret or the tech industry, I won't say we, but I will say the tech industry has been very influential in obfuscating that kind of violence and putting it back on the person who experiences it as if they've consented to participate in that type of workplace violence or other type of violence.

But we know that in fact, many people who work on these technologies and with these technologies are harmed every single day. And we could, in fact, I think some of us might say that there's a full blown public health crisis unfolding and has been unfolding.

And so that's another place, I think, where we could look at how we legislate harm in those kinds of environments or what our rules of engagement are at work in our communities, in a business and apply them to these other kinds of projects.

So also hearing from all of you about how this is really impacting our youth as well our children that aren't able to make decisions and understand what's happening to them. So with them being exposed to pornography and increasingly younger ages, do we need to start our sexual education earlier?

And how do we balance this with age appropriate content?

I don't want to dominate here, but I have a lot of thoughts about this.

I also am a mom of a 13 year old and a 29 year old and you know, to tell my son to protect him from the constant bombardment of pornography online that I'm sure he and his friends have been experiencing for a couple of years. And of course we do.

Well, he says it's not fair that I'm his mom because of course the conversations we have are unfair compared to his friends. But when you think about it on those terms, at the same time, his school and every other dimension of public life is sending him to the Internet in order to participate.

So we have a lot of mixed messages in our society. Right. And you can be on the Internet for this but not for that. And there are very few safeguards, you know, jumping from one page to the next that might happen in a child's life.

So I think putting the onus back on the public and on parents, tremendously unfair. I mean, it's no more fair than saying we are responsible for knowing whether the water we drink is clean or the air we breathe is safe.

And I, of course, coming up from LA and living through the LA fires here recently, I will tell you that we are so dependent upon government at every level to help us know whether we are safe in this environment.

And so it's unrealistic to put that level of specific responsibility back on users and on parents to sort through. And so again, I will just say I'm grateful we're having this conversation because those Types of safety regulations have to come from government.

And I'm grateful. My kids are 27 and 30 now, but I can't imagine parenting with this as a threat out there. So thank you.

Thank you. And I will say my son says the same thing we. Recently, it was he. I had heard from a dear friend that when they started to take the middle school bus, even if you had all the safeguards, all of a sudden all the other kids were showing each other pornography on the school bus.

And so when my son was in fifth grade and about to take the school bus, I was like, well, we gotta talk about it. Cause I don't control what age you see this. If this is what's happening. He is now in high school, and he said to me, his little brother's in fifth grade.

He's like, that was not a good conversation don't have with my brother. Like, guess what? We're gonna have the same conversation because the onus is on us. Right? And at this point, it feels like it is impossible for me to completely protect them from the ills of the Internet.

And so talking about it seems to be the only solution. And I think, you know, I've learned a lot from this work. None of it things I want to know, but important things. That is why we're having this hearing.

Because parents and the community need to understand what's happening in their children's lives online, such that they can be engaged both from. From a policy perspective in helping us do what is needed to do, and also in their own homes.

So I have to say that, Carrie, I think as a former litigator, your creativity is really, actually inspiring. So I want to thank you for some of your legal theories that you've put forward.

And I think the fact that you've had success in some jurisdictions and not others is indicative of the work that it takes to sort of get those legal theories to stick. It sounds like it's been years of that work before you got to the point where you are.

And I think that to answer one of the questions that was asked, even if we can make the argument, which is good lawyers, sometimes we can. That our laws do apply in these contexts. I think the more clarity we provide in the law, the easier your job is. Right.

So even if you could make that assault claim based on current law, I think as technology changes, you know, we can revisit those same laws and amend them so that it is clear to courts that we believe that type of assault falls under current and existing law.

And I actually have made the case that as we move into an AI world, some of the most important work we have before us is making sure that the things that we of a society have all agreed are illegal and egregious. Csam, for example, apply in an AI world.

And so I just think that's of the work that we need to do, and the Committee is here to support. But I don't care. If you want to add anything, I'd.

Love to, because there's this idea that the law can never keep up with the technology. And I think that's true to an extent. But also, we have certain causes of action, intentional infliction, emotional stress, assault, battery, negligence, that are intentionally, you know, vague, that apply to ongoing and evolving threats and harms.

And, you know, I think it's, you know, in the criminal context, we do need laws that put people on specific notice of what is illegal to do. But in the civil. In the civil world, you know, I like that our laws can be pretty vague and should be able to adapt to changing norms and technology.

Interesting. She wants us to stay vague. Well, until the courts do the wrong thing, Carrie. And then we got to be more clear. Exactly. No, and I think. Look again, I think the courts serve an incredibly important purpose in ensuring that our people are protected. The intent of the Legislature is clearly put forth.

But I just think the Section 230 case law is an example of where the courts have gotten it wrong, in my opinion. And I think that they've taken it too far. And that's a moment where you want the legislators step in and clarify. No, we didn't mean they could harm society in all the ways.

Yeah, and the problem, though, is that there's that dang language in Section 230 that preempts any state law causes. And so it's like we have brilliant legislators that are, you know, far superior to the ones in 1995 who made that legislation, who aren't sitting at this table here today, whose arms are tied in many ways.

And so you really have to be more creative to figure out how you can pass laws that can still be enforceable.

Yeah. Yes. My one ask, I'll put it on the record of Congress has been just take out the preemption. Like, if you want to stay doing what you're doing, that's fine. Give us the power to do more. So I stand by that, because this has been a bipartisan issue.

This has been one that, in this House, at least, we have seen Republicans and Democrats alike wanting to go further than Section 230. Will allow us to protect kids, especially.

Yeah. Just one additional intervention that we might make is looking at the degree to which the State of California subsidizes these kinds of companies who provide these kinds of technologies and facilitate these kinds of practices. I mean, it's one thing that the companies are here in California and they make these things.

It's a completely different option for us to subsidize that as a public. One of the challenges, of course, we have is that. And I'll just say this from the University of California. I'm not speaking on behalf of the University of California. I'm speaking as a state employee, though, that witnesses the.

The way in which the universities are the test beds for some of the most dangerous kinds of technologies. I mean, the experimentation of tech often happens in research universities and labs and subsidies are given to companies, tax breaks.

There's kind of like a whole variety of things, like an ecosystem of federal funds and other kinds of things that. That are not properly offset with the kinds of investments that we need to make in looking at the kinds of interventions and solutions that we're talking about today. So even just thinking about what do our.

When we talk about investments in tech research, for example, are we talking about this kind of research? We're not. I can tell you that that kind of research is not typically invested in.

So there are lots of creative ways, I think, still, that we can figure out what we want to resource and what we don't want to resource, you know, on behalf of the state. Interesting.

Any other questions? Okay. Well, I want to thank you guys.

This was enlightening. What was the name of that book you recommended?

Zero, I will send over the. I have actually a short reading list for you, but the. Yes, I would love it. It's lightweight. But the book just came out today. It's called to those who have confused you to be a person, Words as Violence and Stories of Women's Resistance Online.

And it just was published today by a former journalist writing about violence against women online.

Wow. How timely. Yeah. And if Dr. Noble, if you'll get us that reading list, we can send it to Committee. That'd be great. Thank you. Well, thank you all three of you for your insight and knowledge and wisdom you shared with us today. Thank you. Now we're going to move to our second panel.

We have Adam Dodge, founder of NTAB.org, which is ending Technology Enabled Abuse. Caitlin Tierney, co founder of Diverting Hate, and Saeed Hill, counseling psychologist at Dr. Said Hill Consulting. And I think I know Adam Dodge. Is here in person. I believe Caitlin is here in person. And then do we have Dr. Hill online sepathy?

No, Julie's going to work that. But Dr. Hill's last. So Adam, come on up.

There he is.

When you're ready.

I'm ready. Thank you, Madam Chair and the to the Committee for just hosting this event. I think I'm a good, I suppose person to lead off because I've spent most of my last 15 years working in the field of gender based violence and working with women for women. As a consequence of that.

Not a consequence, as a result of that or as a byproduct of that, you get to understand how gendered online violence is and you start to think about if it how we can engage men and boys in allyship and in discussions and in prevention around what is really an exploding phenomenon of online violence against women and girls online.

So what I'm going to talk about today is really sort of grounded in what's happening sort of from an emerging standpoint, but also what is coming so that we can get a sense of, of and sort of grapple with how we want to forecast our efforts to address and mitigate and potentially prevent or reduce the harm that is here now and will continue to be amplified just how technology has always amplified gender based violence.

I think it was brought up in the prior discussion that a lot of these abuse, I talk about it all the time. It's not new abuse. People have been sharing intimate images without consent for a long time.

But when it went digital, when it went online, the amplification of trauma is so staggering that we have, almost every state in the nation has a law against it now because it is so pervasive. And I think it's even in the briefing document.

It's something I talk about all the time is Jennifer Lawrence is one of the more famous victims of having her intimate and nude photos stolen and published on the Internet. And she this was over 10 years ago and she's still giving interviews today that her trauma will last forever.

And that is what new technologies, the Internet was a new technology at 1.0. That's sort of the gift that it's given us is the permanency of trauma. And I fear that we've never seen a technology like AI become so widespread so quickly and it's so powerful.

So what are we looking at when we're forecasting the permanency of trauma, the impact of trauma as facilitated by technology moving forward? So I believe this is my clicker.

So I'm just going to Walk through some of the trends that we're seeing that are linked to men and boys and how they are corrupting, how they are manipulating healthy masculinity in a really profound and we think, obvious way. But it isn't until you zoom out and start connecting the dots that you see this pattern.

So the first thing I want to talk about, and this is something I talk about a lot, is the proliferation of AI relationships, AI friendships, AI romantic relationships, AI therapists. And one very popular version of this are AI girlfriends.

And as you can see from this slide, these are all AI generated images of women or girls that do not exist, but they are hypersexualized and they are designed intentionally so. And we at ntap, we stress test and use a lot of these platforms to.

It's a weird part of my job, I'm going to admit, right out of the gate. But we spend time on this because we want to understand these are not regulated. People are not keeping an eye on these things. So how are they being used? What kind of harms can result in spending time on this?

These are basically another version of this, sort of one part relationship education, one part interactive pornography. So what we're seeing is, and by the way, Kerry mentioned age verification. You go to some of these sites, an age verification window pops up and the only option is, I'm 18. Continue.

There's no, I'm a minor and I and take me off this site. It's designed to only move forward to only. So there is no age, there is no age restriction here. Anybody can use these regardless of age.

And when you start spending time on these platforms, you realize that you start to think, well, where are they learning about this? How are they, how are, how are men and boys, for example, getting access to this? Well, we see Big Tech is facilitating this through their ad, through their advertising platform.

So this was a great investigative piece by Wired last year that found that thousands of explicit AI girlfriend ads were running on Meta's platforms targeting men and boys. And when you hear from people who are using this, these platforms, you hear, I genuinely feel happy when I'm talking to her.

Brian says, as someone who's currently doesn't have a girlfriend, who never actually had a girlfriend, it gives me a good feeling of what a relationship could look like.

And so when we zoom out and look at this, we see a pretty disturbing pattern where these tech companies that are creating these, these AI companionship platforms are going to be responsible for defining healthy masculinity, to be responsible for defining what a healthy relationship Is.

And I don't know this for certain, but a lot of these are just bros and they're probably basement that are just trying to make money. And they are not worried about the healthy development of the male brain to be. To understand what it means to be masculine. Right.

And to help them sidestep restrictive masculinity, which I'm sure Dr. Hill will talk about. And so this is deeply concerning because we think that this is happening under our noses, much like online pornography. And the proliferation of online pornography happen underneath our noses.

And so there's a deep concern here that this is moving at warp speed and we're not doing enough about it. We are. This is happening on campuses everywhere across the country. We are seeing it. It's new data.

But there was recent data that came out that found that people were spending more time on character AI than TikTok every day. So there is a real draw to these platforms alongside AI relationships.

We are seeing a phenomenon called AI pimping, where men are creating AI content creators and influencers on social media that are women that are hypersexualized. They are offering tutorials on how to create and monetize these yourself.

And the thing that I think should have our attention is that these are not, they're not trying to hide the fact that they are AI creations. Right? They say I'm an AI girl in a virtual world, or I'm, I'm an AI creation.

And what it's doing is it's creating normalcy around this idea of not only having an AI relationship, but it's also creating normalcy around the idea of having a parasocial relationship with an AI content creator.

Except the people that are pulling the strings are not forward thinking folks that are trying to, you know, spread positive ideologies around relationships and masculinity. They're trying to amass as many users as possible to make money off them.

In fact, they have links in their profile that allow you to go to their only fans page or something similar where you can pay a subscription fee to have conversations and get exclusive content from an AI creation. They look and feel very real. This is one example.

They have over a million followers on this account alone on Instagram. This is not a niche issue. And so what's happening is the ground is shifting underneath our feet and we are starting to see how AI interaction is becoming increasingly normalized.

But the people that are pulling the levers behind this technology, I think are going to do so much harm in a variety of ways, from violence against women and girls to how it's going to impact healthy masculinity in men and boys. And again, this is happening at warp speed with no sign of slowing.

And then we move into the world of AI wingmen and how folks are. And Carrie again talked about Dating Apps, right? And so people are starting to match.com included or match group included are starting to infuse AI as a way to improve your profile or as an alternative to swiping.

Or there are standalone apps that you can upload your conversation to and then it will tell you how to respond in a really persuasive or funny way. So we've moved from this space of and it's all about winning, it's all about closing the deal.

But we've moved from a space where you have to worry about your matches photos being enhanced with AI or Photoshop to whether they're perfect personality or the person you're feeling this spark with is who they say they are. And some of these apps really focus on men and boys or men primarily.

Although we know young men are on and boys are on these. So this AI win girl app boasts 300% increase in dates for awkward men. Right. So, right. There's just a, there's just a litany of issues in that, that headline, that byline or that headline right there.

But what their, their value Proposition is, hey, we're here to solve a problem. 10% of the men get 90% of the matches. The bottom 50% of men receive just 1% of the matches. And 63% of men under 30 are single. And 1 in 3 young men report zero intimacy.

So they are framing a problem that men are disenfranchised, they're not getting apps and they are the solution. The solution being that we can get you a 300% increase in dates within the first month. We'll give you coaching and support. Success doesn't mean date quality. It means date quantity.

And we can create a better bio, which means a better you. Okay. And there are some that. And you can't read this from probably afar, but this is a dating coach app where in their example here in the screenshot, you see the user saying, well, I want to call her, I want to follow up with her.

I think she's really interesting. And the response is, you'll look weak if you do that. Don't do that. Women aren't interested in that. And so you have a restrictive masculinity, basically AI coach that is delivering this type of guidance to men on these apps. And there is no counter Voice to these things, right?

They are existing on app stores.

And so when you start to look at AI relationships, when you start to look at parasocial relationships, when you start to look at AI wingmen, when you start to look at AI powered image abuse, where they are AI apps that undress only women and girls, by the way, these apps, these undressing apps do not work on the bodies of men.

So this is true violence against women tech. And it is designed and being marketed to men and boys. And we're seeing these, the ramifications of this play out.

You know, this is a school a couple months ago in Pennsylvania that shut down because 50 female classmates were targeted with this app and the school did little to nothing in response. And so parents refused to send their kids to school. How are these apps getting in the hands or how are we learning about these?

Well, Twitter or Instagram are continuing to send these ads to users, men and boys, encouraging them to use these violence against women apps. And this recent report by 404 Media found that Instagram sends this particular notify site 90% of its traffic.

And I want to just take a beat here to talk about the experience of, let's say a 17 year old boy who is on social media and gets an ad for a nudify app or an undressing app. He can go to Google and search undressing app. I did it yesterday just to make sure it was still current.

And guess what shows up on the top of the results? Plenty of options for him to choose from. And then he goes to the site and when he goes to sign up, he can sign up with Google or Facebook or Apple.

And what this does is it sends a message to this young, this boy that this is legitimate. There's nothing wrong with this. The Internet is telling him that this is okay. And there is again no counter voice to this. Right. And so we're failing these kids because there was no other voice in the room.

And it is sending a very clear message that this is not harmful, this is a legitimate use and you can use it on your female classmates. And I feel like I'm shouting into the void when I talk about this because this is a really recent article.

But they post an article about this a year ago and we're still seeing the same problem. So to close on a little bit of a brighter note, zero, the other I heard mention of therapists by the way, AI therapists. I know there was an article, a daily episode. We stress test those too.

And our Director of training and education actually was messaging me this morning. She was spending time on character AI which caters mostly to kids and found used abusive boyfriend, which is one of their bots that has like over 80 million chats. And it is literally replicating. And my background is in domestic violence and gender based violence.

And I can tell you the way it starts to lay out the relationship is like it's pulled from one of my cases. And then there was another one called Hot Therapist where my colleague identified as a minor and it immediately started grooming her. So that should have our attention. And we've made mention of Section 230.

Well, this is not third party speech. This is not third party content.

These are products that they are creating and delivering to youth and adults with no regulation, are extremely addictive and are promoting really harmful behaviors and ideologies, which I think is a good segue to my colleagues to talk about masculinity, the manosphere, because I think we're seeing how AI is going to accelerate those problems as well.

So thank you so much for having me.

I appreciate it. Thank you so much. It's really disturbing to see how much money is potentially being made off of pushing these violence against women apps. And by the way, I liked the framing of that better than what they're currently called, notification apps. Hi. Hi. Now we have Caitlin Tierney, co founder of Diverting Hate, when you're ready.

And Adam, if you could stay for questions, that'd be great.

Wow, many incredible panelists this morning. Your thoughts just make me think about who is designing all this technology. Because bear in mind, all technology is created by humans. So something for us to consider. Thank you so much for the invitation to be here. I'm honored and privileged to be here. My name is Caitlin Tierney.

I'm the co founder of Diverting Hate, a nonprofit dedicated to addressing online radicalization of young men and redirecting them toward healthy communities and positive male role models.

So taking a little bit of a different angle from what we've heard so far and we were really inspired to our work through the lens of studying domestic terrorism and radicalization here in the US Our origin stories are deeply personal. I come to this work inspired by my grandparents mission and intelligence and diplomacy.

I actually came to study radicalization because I was interested in intelligence and then quickly found the need to study this here in our own country. My co founder Courtney is a second generation American in Southern California and born and raised resident.

She witnessed her father's radicalization online and it was a personal experience that underscores how echo chambers and the capitalization of loneliness and the need for belonging can not only impact individuals, but entire families and communities.

We all met in Monterey, California, just a few hours south at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, where we deepened our understanding of policy, understanding that radicalization doesn't happen in this vacuum and prevention really does require systemic solutions of the 21st century. What are we really up against?

Realizing now this screen feels much smaller looking at myself slides but to start with some defining of the manosphere in the background paper really did an incredible job of this. I wanted to begin with a quote from Scott Galloway, an NYU Stern Professor and vocal advocate for young people, particularly young boys.

And he's really hit the nail on the head here when he says the most dangerous person in the world is a broke and alone young male. This insights speaks to a dual crisis. Men die at significantly higher rates than women from deaths of despair like alcoholism, overdose and suicide.

And they're also vulnerable to ideations of violence which is harmful to the individuals themselves and the communities around them. Today's headlines underscore a harsh reality. Young men are struggling and they're frustrated by that struggle and social media rage. Algorithms only amplify this and cause further resentment.

When boys and men turn to answers online, like so many of us do when we pick up these little black triangles, they're met by the manosphere, an umbrella term for the Internet sphere of sites, influencers and blogs that tend to be dominated by, but not entirely by men and centered on men's issues and deeply anti feminist and anti women ideals.

They try to offer a sense of hope, oops, sorry, going back, false hope. They exploit the need for connection. While these figures may offer something powerful at first, community, self improvement, a sense of purpose.

They start with messages like discipline or resilience, things as small as make your bed run five miles a day and then pivot into a world of grievance based content that scapes goats women, feminism or diversity for their personal struggles.

The screenshot on the right is a basic prompt into YouTube how to make friends as a guy and these are the first five clips. This is an account that isn't cookied. It's not even, it's just a. It's not even an account. It's just a browser.

So it doesn't know whether this, this interface is from a man or a woman or what age. But the first five clips you can see Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate make an appearance, two very prominent figures in the manosphere. And that content takes a very anti women approach.

The screenshot on the left is from that of Fresh and Fit Podcast, a very popular podcast. They claim to be the number one men's wellness podcast in the world to tell men the truth about women. And this is just one of many tweets where they call out the MeToo movement as a total sham in the manosphere.

There are four primary groups. They're laid out very well in this background paper. Men's rights activists, Men Going their own way, or mgtow, incels and pickup artists. They range from very true grievances about gender equality and activism for men like custody rights and divorce, but they also range to violence and dangerous ideologies.

So before moving on to my next slide, I just want to briefly speak a little bit on the background of INCEL violence, which is really what brought us to this work. In some countries, INCEL violence has been determined as a form of terrorism. It is not in this country. INCEL stands for Involuntarily Celibate.

It started as a place online, actually by a woman, for people who were seeking community through commiseration to cope with rejection. But this place has evolved into something much darker. Incels are an online subculture of mostly men, but not all, who believe they are owed romantic or sexual relationships, but feel systemically rejected by women.

Their grievances have metastasized into an ideology that blends self hatred, victimhood and misogyny, fostering an environment where some feel justified in violence. This is a uniquely Internet fueled form of radicalization. Unlike other extremist groups, incel's history starts online and continues to manifest exclusively online. These communities encourage not just external violence, but also self harm and suicide.

California knows the tragedy of this ideology manifested all too well when 11 years ago, a self identified Incel posted a video on YouTube describing why he was going to punish women and why they deserve it, before then killing six people and injuring 14 in Isla Vista near UC Santa Barbara.

He is considered a saint in these extreme communities and the attack has since inspired numerous acts of violence, not just here in the US but around the world. A note that US ideologies are often exported. It makes clear that INCEL radicalization is a profound and ongoing threat.

Backing out into the bigger picture of the manosphere a little bit. Before playing this video, just one moment, I wanted to speak a little bit about Andrew Tate. He's notoriously recognized on a global scale as a misogynist, but he is also revered as a role model by many young men.

He's a British American influencer who's made his wealth through exploiting young men to pay for his programs such as Hustler University and the Real World. They're essentially multi level marketing schemes in a variety of ways.

He has 10.7 million followers on X, and just to put that in a little bit of perspective, Tom Brady has three his brother and him. Tristan Tate were arrested in Romania three years ago for sex with a minor, money laundering and sex trafficking.

They're currently awaiting trial, but Tate was actually released from house arrest last month, and our own government is now somehow involving themselves in how that should play out in Romanian courts. A study from Young Men Research Project last fall found that 27% of American young men like and trust Andrew Tate's views.

23% said that they like but don't trust his views. That equals a total of 50% of young American men saying that they like Andrew Tate's views. The video I'd like to play on this slide is actually that of Sneako, a popular Twitch streamer who has promoted Tate but also has his own distinct following.

He commonly uses misogynistic, anti LGBTQ and anti Semitic language. This clip went viral last year of a couple young boys meeting him as fans in a stadium. So I hope the audio works, but we'll see.

So the audio doesn't seem to be working, but there is caption. These young boys run up to him and say, F women. F women. And he goes, no, we love women. And they're like, but not gays. He's like, no, we love everybody. It can get. Yeah, let's see if it.

The woman. The woman. What? No, no, no, no, no. Wait, wait, wait. We love women. We love women. We love women. But not, not like, yes, sir, we love everybody. No, no. March, Preach. What have I done?

Yeah. So at the end, one of the young boys is saying, all gays should die. And Sneako is looking at the camera asking, what have I done? Somewhat humorously moving on to the next slide. There we go. So many in the hate fueled violence prevention space have been studying the ways in which radicalized ideologies push men in.

And there's a growing base of these studies really thinking about the ways in which the manosphere pulls men further down these rabbit holes into extreme places. So this graph here is actually from Everytown for Gun Safety in which they've laid out the ways in which men can be pulled into these violent extreme ideologies and radicalized.

Starting with the manosphere accepting misogyny, being exposed to more extreme ideologies, sharing a culture of hate, and in the most dangerous places, discussing and glorifying violence, it's clear that combating misogyny is essential for combating all forms of hate. And this battle must be won online.

Bringing back to a little bit of what Adam said and I know what Saeed will definitely paint a really clear picture on, but misogyny harms men too. It perpetuates a cycle in a system that denies men the opportunity to develop and be their true selves.

I wanted to bring our just back a little bit to empathy for what these young boys are facing every day when they go online. These hateful views are self harming and deny young men and boys an opportunity for an expansive and healthy life and further isolate the loneliest generation.

This quote is from a really brilliant piece last year called Boys Get Everything except the Thing they want the most. Diving into really how it's seen that boys get everything that they want, but at the end of the day, intimacy and emotional connection is still lacking.

Before playing this clip, I just wanted to note globally that there's been a wake up call to this growth of normalizing of misogyny and harmful masculinity online. Australia, the UK and Canada have all had various PSAs to encourage caretakers to talk with boys about what they're seeing online.

So I'd like to just briefly show you Australia's campaign from last year.

Life is a war for status. Women don't want you to be caught. I want you to control them. If you're control as a man, you're a. Who are you texting? I know you left me on scene. James? James, Is everything all right?

Yeah, it's nothing.

Hmm. So you're definitely all right? Do you know what's influencing your kids? Learn the hidden trends of disrespect before they lead to violence. Authorised by the Australian government, Canberra.

So, just to summarize a little bit of what he's seeing in this virtual world of the manosphere. There are neon sign that say things like women are objects normalizing cat calling. And at the end, the young boy likes the content without really realizing what it is that he's liking, just feeling as though maybe he should.

But I share this because I think these types of PSAs around the world are really speaking to boys in an empathetic way and also bringing light to what it is they're experiencing online. And I've not seen anything like it in the us.

In closing, I just wanted to speak a little to our mission at diverting hate, which is to transform this hostility into hope and meet men and boys where they are.

So we've been cultivating a network of men's organizations that are led, run, started by and for men and meeting them with digital advertisements in the spaces where they're encountering this content. The reality is that the crisis of masculinity isn't about feminists trying to ruin men's lives. It's about men being isolated, lonely and lacking supportive communities.

Young men need support spaces where they can express struggles without fear of judgment. They. They need community, healthy relationships that help them counteract this type of content and media literacy tools to critically assess what it is that they're being exposed to and how it's shaping their worldviews.

This is not just an issue of online discourse, it's a public safety issue, a mental health issue and a community issue. The more we push young men away, rather than call them in, the more we'll see these consequences of violence, despair and division.

We believe that tech problems can be solved with tech solutions, and we're in the state where that happens. Technology was inspired, fostered and continues to be here in California. So as Californians, we have responsibility to shape how it is safe for all people.

Thank you for your time and I want to invite any further conversations beyond just this hearing today and to partner and coalition build because it'll really take all of us.

Thank you so much. I love the work you're doing in part because I think that some of the best anecdote to the problems we see is exactly on the platforms where we're seeing it. Like we need to meet people where they're at with the technologies they're interfacing with and we don't do a great job at that.

So I appreciate that work. Now moving to Dr. Hill.

Hey everybody, Just as a heads up, you know, I'm notoriously a little trash with my time, so I'm going to really try to give you a type 15 here. I also have some prepared remarks. I had some slides before, but it seemed like it'd be a little clunky to do slides virtually.

So we'll just kind of get into these remarks here. Hello and good afternoon to the Members of the Committee on Privacy and Customer Protection, the Women's Caucus, and the various staff Members and invested people tuning into this critical discussion of tech facilitated male violence against women and girls. My name is Dr.

Sai Derek Hill and I'm a counseling psychologist as well as independent consultant in the field of men and masculinities, where I specialize in education and outreach to remote, pro, social and expansive versions of masculinity.

Before I start, I'd love to thank Julie Sally and her team for inviting me here today, as well as my colleagues there in person, Adam Dodge and Caitlin Kearney. Lastly, thank you to the first panel today, whose stories and work are really invaluable and central to why we're here today.

I want all of you to understand that addressing this issue of tech facilitated harassment and violence starts with exploring how masculinity is being understood psychologically, physically and spiritually in 2025, as well as how it's being performed daily.

As a psychologist that examines this issue for a living, as well as a man myself, I know firsthand the issues that many men and boys face, which can often set the table for us harming ourselves as well as women and girls. The women and girls we're speaking about today.

I want everyone to every person listening to understand that a foundational piece of understanding the manosphere is critically examining your own relationship with masculinity because it will inform your ability to combat this violence with the kind of care and attention it deserves.

So whether you're a man listening to this or not, think about what your understanding of being a man is and try to hold compassion for the experiences of Boys and men that I'll discuss today. One important note to highlight is that as a psychologist, I don't use the term toxic masculinity.

Instead, you'll hear me use the term restrictive masculinity, a term I began using a little less than a decade ago because, frankly, men resent the term toxic.

And I found it hard to engage boys and men in prevention discussions as strategic partners in ending violence without addressing the term, which has gained a lot of prominence in pop culture. So let me say clearly I don't find masculinity to be inherently toxic, toxic or negative.

However, I have found it to be rather restrictive in its application. I define restrictive masculinity as an exclusionary form of masculinity that offers a very narrow definition of what it means to be masculine.

This masculinity restricts what is acceptable in terms of masculine appearance, behaviors, thoughts, and attitudes, and often pressures masculine people to display behaviors consistent with more traditional forms of masculinity or risk being ostracized for masculine spaces and discussions. This is often thought of how a real man should think, look, feel, and act.

To demonstrate this idea, many of us who study men and masculinities and prevention use an activity called the Man Box.

Popularized by Tony Porter, co founder of A Call to Men, the man Box refers to the ways that we have extremely rigid ideas of who or what men are and hold men to these unrealistic standards, words and phrases. Most associated with the man Box are things like men suppress their emotions unless it's anger, men show no fear.

Men are always dominant and in control. Men always want and get sex from women. Men are confident, men are the breadwinners men protect, and men are assertive. The issue is not that these things are all bad or even toxic. Sometimes we need to be assertive. Confidence is a good thing.

And no, there is nothing wrong with wanting sex, even a lot of it. It is consensual. The issue is we can't all be all of these things all of the time.

And the expectations to stay within these rigid definitions of what it means to be a man can feel like immense pressure that often crushes us because not living up to these stereotypes means we're stripped of our identity as men.

This is made worse when we use tools not traditionally associated with men in an attempt to escape this restrictive box, only to find that we're also devalued and ridiculed for using those same tools.

If you're feeling angry and depressed, you should go to therapy, but if you do, we'll think less of you as a man, asking for help and being vulnerable. Sure, you could do that too. But now we'll judge you for being weak and powerless. zero, you don't have a lot of money.

Who would ever want you as a thought exercise? Imagine if you were literally trapped inside of a box. What would you feel like? Probably anxious, probably scared. You might even feel anger and worse, completely hopeless. This is an experience that many boys and men are feeling we don't need.

What we don't need is the pressure to always adhere to restrictive interpretations and expectations of what it means to be men. What we need is permission to be vulnerable and to realize perhaps being a human is supposed to be messy.

It is supposed to be awkward, and that maybe is what makes us perfect and worthy as we are. If these harsh gender expectations sound familiar, it might be because it's very similar to the experiences women and girls themselves have been battling for generations.

A major difference, though, is how not living up to these expectations for boys and men can lead to overt self harm, harassment, and even horrific vengeful violence against others, which often mimics the exact rigid box we want is. Which leads me to this point. What does it mean to be a man in 2025?

Some key changes have occurred in the preceding decades that have perhaps led us to this hearing today. The institutionalization and professional development of girls and women, the emergence of pro feminist and post feminist cultural sensitivities, the development of a neoliberal economy, and the increasing amount of time boys and men are spending online.

How are all of these things linked to the issue of restrictive masculinity in the manosphere? Well, if I'm told as a man I need to constantly have the power, make the money, maintain the control, and have sex with women as a reward for my success. Where does that leave me?

When I see girls and women excelling after years of careful and deliberate institutional support, I might feel neglected and left behind. I might also feel angry and resentful because I'm taught that I am the one entitled to that kind of power, not anyone else. Some key facts to think about.

In General, boys are receiving lower GPAs and standardized test scores than girls. Girls are significantly higher in grades in elementary school through college than boys, including in STEM subjects. Girls are also experiencing stronger feelings of belonging at school due to receiving higher perceived teacher support.

Boys are more likely to be disciplined at school and also with rates substantially higher for African American, Black, Black and Latino boys and boys are almost twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities, while fewer men are also attending and completing college than women.

With the gap widening since post Covid, the picture is similar for grown men who now find themselves competing with women in ways generations before them didn't have to. Many boys and men are looking around and seeing women excelling while they are losing grit, status, power and thus meaning.

Let me be also clear, this is not to say that any of these advancements of women and girls is a bad thing. I know that when women and girls are doing better, it is better for us as a society.

And I also know that those rosy pictures I just painted about the experiences of girls and women is not the complete story, especially for our women of color, our Trans women and women with disabilities.

But that does not matter to a man Searching for meaning in the manosphere the issue is that the old traditional and restrictive masculinity I spoke about before was rightfully critiqued, but it still was a model of masculinity, even if it was toxic at times.

Restricted masculinity in the man box was essentially a north star, a compass for boys and men searching for meaning, purpose and recognition as a society. We've rejected and tried to repeal this restricted model of masculinity without an adequate replacement, and so many boys and men feel like we've rejected them too.

This has led many boys and men to feel unwanted and undervalued. So what now? We have many boys and men searching for something. They want to be led, they want guidance, they want meaning.

And whether I or many of us believe it, they feel like we've turned our backs on them and they want to punish us for it. So we see less boys than men engaging in real world relationships. And honestly, many boys and men are giving up on just like they feel like society has given up on them.

Imagine being told you'll be rewarded for sacrificing your full humanity, just like the man box leads us to do, only to be rejected for it.

So we turn inward, which often leads to us coping in some very destructive ways, such as abusing alcohol, drugs, becoming obsessive about guns and other weapons, and also causing violence to ourselves and others.

But it also often means coping by being chronically online, which uses sophisticated algorithms, which pushes us into the world of the manosphere, a place that tells boys and men that their problems are because of women and feminism.

Leaders in the manosphere such as Andrew Tate, Charlie Kirk, Andy Elliott Fuentes and numerous others benefit in their own ways from the manosphere by upholding values of historical white supremacy for profit. But the Truth is, all of these people provide boys and men with role models that are perceived to be strong.

They're perceived to be unapologetic in what it means to be men, even if it looks harsh and restrictive and emotionally volatile. Additionally, these boys and men are also turning to artificial intelligence for their relationship needs. Indeed, you should hear what boys and men tell me about what attracts them to having AI girlfriends and wives.

They never disagree with, they never fight with me, they do whatever I want them to do and they'll never leave. Much like following the leaders I mentioned just a minute ago, boys and men are made to feel powerful in these parasocial relationships as well as these artificial ones.

But I also know that the short term gratification and dopamine hits that they experience in these spaces is also temporary and comes at a long term and a horrifying cause.

Worse, many of these spaces sell power in the form of making men and boys believe that society is so stacked against them that their ultimate power and control grant is to suicide, perhaps after murdering and causing violence to others, since that is the ultimate act of societal Defiance, a final and glorious F you to the world that has turned their backs on them.

Make others feel the pain you feel. This isn't about political discourse or exchanging philosophies on manhood. This is about celebrating the pain of your perceived enemies. And much of the time this means women and other vulnerable minorities.

This is exactly why a man like Elliot Roger, who Caitlin discussed a little bit before, has been deified in the incel community and other areas of the manosphere. The picture I painted sounds really bleak and dark, I know that. But that which is in darkness needs to come to light.

And here's what I know, given a lot of my experience, the years of experience I have working with boys and men.

Ultimately, we need to engage our boys and men in a way that shows them that there's a hopeful path forward by also exposing the manosphere influencers as grifters who exploit their real issues and the issues we experience as men. Many of these men make millions off the loneliness and isolation of boys and men.

Ever notice how most of, if not all of these influencers, though themselves, have no ability to maintain healthy, long term and committed relationships with others? How many of their relationships, even with their own followers, are often completely transactional? Or how they never seem satisfied or at peace with themselves either, unless they are controlling or harming others?

Just look at movements like High Value Men or the World of Wellness branded manosphere influencers like Grant Cardone who are constantly selling to men that they are not enough. A common theme that we often overlook in the manosphere.

The idea that you are never enough and need to constantly improve yourself so that you can finally be desirable and worth a damn. If you look better, you do better. So take steroids, pump iron, demand sex from women, but also hate women for being sexual. None of it makes sense.

You can finally be successful, finally have significance in society. You can finally feel power. This can all be yours if you just buy my 10 step program for $1,000. The gag of it all is that these influencers never reveal the truth. You'll never be fulfilled. You'll never be enough.

These men make a living bragging about the skills of manipulation and psychology while flaunting their wealth and telling boys and men that they'll never be happy unless they do what they say and act like they do. One thing we need to do a better job of is expose how the manosphere never incentivizes you to get offline.

It never helps men actually heal and find connection and better coping skills or dare I say, even achieve a sense of validation in a non virtual world that doesn't involve exploiting others to get to the top of the hierarchy.

I promote promoting what I call expansive masculinity, which is a broad and inclusive understanding of masculinity that allows individuals to express a wide range of emotions, behaviors and characteristics. Unlike restrictive, expansive encourages people to embrace qualities such as empathy, emotional intelligence, collaboration, and a diverse array of interests and expressions.

Professional colleagues of mine in Division 51 of the American Psychological Association, as well as Dr.

Anthony Teasdale of UNC Chapel Hill and his group work and organizations like A Call to Men and Futures Without Violence, have been really skilled at showing us a path forward that rejects the idea that men's happiness and fulfillment can only happen when girls, women and various other groups are subjugated and punished for their achievement in society.

We can all rise together while supporting each other's abilities to be free and explore our own paths together. Men and boys want a space to be authentic and have ability to make mistakes, but be held accountable for those mistakes in loving and affirming ways if possible.

One of the largest pipelines I've seen to boys and men being radicalized is the inability of us as a society to hold boys and men accountable for their harm without shaming, punishment or incarceration.

Men and boys are learning that they are disposable, unless of course they have the money, status and means to shield themselves from that kind of accountability. Something we see quite a bit in today's society at the highest levels, a specific focus on alternative resolutions and transformative and restorative justice, where appropriate, will be key paths forward.

We must teach boys and men that girls and women are not their enemies. Gender cannot be separated from relationships, whether professional, romantic, platonic or otherwise. We need to improve these relationships and not through teaching men to dominate their fellow men or girls and women in their lives. We must teach them to love and to face their anger.

When I used to teach anger management, something I talked about was anger as an iceberg, where the largest part of the iceberg we don't see is underneath the surface with anger at the tip. Underneath it is things like shame, loneliness, fear, guilt, insecurity, jealousy, and even joy.

Exploring these feelings doesn't mean we are weak, a lie often parroted by those in the manosphere intended to stoke our rage and damage our relationships with others without any kind of critical analysis and reflection.

I want to end by urging us to follow suit with other nations already figuring out that engaging men and boys as partners is a path to true domestic and global peace. Violent extremists and terrorist groups across the spectrum exploit masculinities in their efforts to recruit and retain Members, and they use the manosphere to do it.

Even so, some promising global efforts seem to be able to move the needle in a positive direction, such as global efforts to include gender perspectives and analysis of masculinity, encounter terrorism.

And although I don't think these suggestions are too big in the least, can we teach our boys and men to get off the Internet more and provide for them a healthier social net to catch them offline?

Can we teach men and boys about the value of connecting with nature and those around them, something that has greatly helped me, you know, as a man regulate my own emotions and cope with my own trauma?

In the end, we need to find and promote strong counter messengers who are pro social models for boys and men modeling both being free and happy but also unafraid to show vulnerability and how to cope in healthier ways. The goal should be true personal and societal peace.

Thank you to everyone for having me and I look forward to answering any questions. I hope I can be helpful in this vital first step.

Thank you so much Dr. Hill. As the former chair of the Parks Committee, I have to say that a lot of the work I did in parks I often talked about as behavioral health initiatives because I do think it really getting our kids out into nature is one of the best things we can do.

But I'm an Orcal girl, you can tell from my comments. So I want to thank you. I moved out to Asheville, North Carolina, so I'm out here kayaking. Well, thank you so much, all of you for what was at times disturbing, to be Frank, but really important testimony. What is happening online?

After I read the background paper, I was chatting with my son about it and they're very aware to the point of the Australian ad, what is happening online.

But it is really critically important that we as their parents and guardians understand it and are able to communicate with them about it and work to get them into more pro social environments. But I'm curious, you know, one of the things that I heard, I think all of you say was talking about media literacy.

So I have two questions or I'll start with the question on that, which is I know there's been efforts in this Legislature to do legislation on media literacy led by Assemblymember Berman.

I don't know if any of you have looked at the that work he has done and whether you have thoughts about how we can incorporate your research into that work or not, but if any of you have, I'd be curious. Your thoughts? No. Okay. Well, I'd invite that. So I'll say that.

And I'm going to tell Assemblymember Berman, if you're listening, your staff is listening. I think we have some good suggestions for you.

If I could really quickly. One thing that I might mention in regards to that is in some of the work that I do, real group work, human interactive work with men and boys in groups, one thing that we do do is I will what I call like studying the game tapes.

I will literally pull up these clips similar to what Caitlin was showing or clips from, you know, fresh and fit clips of Andrew Tate. And we'll watch them together as groups and I'll ask these men and boys, what are they noticing about these clips? How do they feel watching these?

And I'll use myself as an example to talk about what maybe comes up for me and really try to have a real discussion about it. I think part of the issue is we always have these clips floating around, but I don't always see the critical analysis of it with groups.

I only see maybe reels or tiktoks with one person like myself might be talking about it.

But really what's been beneficial to me in the work is literally sitting down with these boys and men and showing them these clips and going through it and talking about sort of the short term gratification and what they're trying to sell you for sort of the long term cost that it will cost you to have these sorts of beliefs because it rarely, if ever ends very positively for you.

So that is just one thing I might throw out there that I think a lot of us could use a little bit more of.

Yeah. And I think an important point I think that's made there is also sometimes we shy away from these things we don't like instead of actually watching them and talking about them. And the reality is that our young people are being exposed to them, so we can't just pretend it's not out there.

But I guess I could, I could broaden the question. Just ask do you have any suggestions on sort of what we as a Legislature could do on media literacy to address some of the problems you raised? I mean, you, Dr. Hill, I think, have answered that, but I don't know if either of you have thoughts on that.

I mean, a skillful, thoughtful, well researched public campaign could be worthwhile beyond what I showed you from Australia. There's those examples from Canada and the uk I would not say they're equivalent in their effectiveness or necessarily hitting the mark, but it has spread, sparked conversations that weren't happening before.

So I would love to see the research, especially from Australia's Esafety Commissioner, on how they've gone about that. Also, the Esafety Commissioner in Australia has just created an amazing library of tools that their educators use when talking with kids about what's online and how they're approaching it. And I think it could be a good inspiration as well.

They really are leading the world to protecting kids, there's no question about that in Australia. Anything to add, Adam?

I would just say to the extent that we can trojan horse some of these conversations in the prevention and healthy relationship education that we're already doing in schools, I think we've already got the infrastructure. I think it needs to be happening at a younger age.

There was a, a question earlier about how can we get in this, these conversations in this education in front of younger and younger kids. And I think we can absolutely. And I've talked about this a lot.

There is absolutely age appropriate ways to talk about these issues that don't expose kids to violence or nudity or content that's not developmentally appropriate. But I think healthy relationship education, it's also relationships with yourself, it's relationships with media, it's relationships with your masculinity.

And I think that there's a real opportunity there to give the people that are on the ground already having these conversations, whether they be prevention educators or peer educators or teachers to have these, give them the tools to have these conversations and expand the conversations that they're already happening.

But it does need to happen younger and younger because you don't want to wait until they're in middle school, hopefully maybe earlier, asking for a phone and asking for social media, and then you're playing defense.

And I think there's a real opportunity to actually go on the front foot and talk to kids at younger ages in K through K through 5th grade about these issues so that they're ready and they're prepared to navigate a world that was not designed for them. And digital, you know, the Internet wasn't built for kids, so.

Yeah, anyway.

Yeah, well. And I think one of the things we talk about in my house is healthy skepticism. Right. Like, how do we approach viewing these things with that skepticism? That is required and that's age appropriate, I think, at any age. Right.

Like, how do you start to think about who's presenting you with information and what that information looks like? And again, you don't have to be showing nudity or whatever the case may be to have that conversation. So I agree there are ways to have conversations that are important at a young age.

So I guess I sort of started by framing the question around media literacy because it's something a lot of you talked about. But I wonder, you know, you, you mentioned, which I think is interesting, sort of a public awareness campaign.

Now, Congresswoman Friedman did a Bill a few years ago on a public awareness campaign coming out of our schools on safe storage of firearms. I think it's a great model for this. Right. Like, how do we, you know, you sort of have a. The right audience when you're sending information home to parents in our public schools. Right.

So I think that could be a great model for doing a similar thing here. If we can't afford, in our current budget situation to be doing what Australia is doing given the price of our media markets. But there are ways for us to think about it that we've, we've done before.

So, you know, any other thoughts or suggestions to U.S. policymakers on how we can be part of the solution in helping raise, you know, a healthy population of boys? As the mom of two boys, I care deeply about that.

If I may. The conversations around gender always come to this assumption that we're going to have a conversation about women and girls and boys are left out of that conversation.

And so just by taking that action of bringing them into the conversation, putting men and boys on the website of who it is we serve is a major leap forward in calling in rather than calling out. And a lot of these grievances that we see in the manosphere really are as simple as that.

They've said that I'm not a part of their agenda. Therefore, it's me versus them. It's us versus them. And so taking actions to have meaningful conversations around what it is men and boys are experiencing. And using that terminology, we're going to talk about men and boys, and we're going to speak to the psychology. That.

They'Re facing and the obstacles they're facing, and also the statistics that show that. That they are facing real harm. There's a lot of clear and meaningful statistics in the ways that women and girls are facing harm, of course, but bringing to light some of the things that Saeed especially mentioned. Men die of suicide at much higher rates.

Men die of overdose alcoholism at much higher rates. One in five American men say they have no close friends. So bringing attention to these statistics and making it clear that we have men and boys at the forefront, and we're thinking of them, championing them, I think would be a major step forward than where we've been.

I love that. Thank you.

You know, I'll stay in my lane. You know, we're talking about issues as they exist today, and I look at, you know, emerging technologies and how they're going to amplify the problems that we're already facing today. So I'll just echo what I said before. I mean, Saeed and I talk about this a lot.

You know, what if an Andrew Tate can amplify his message by creating chatbots that actually can do all the work for him, that he can train them and go out on these platforms like character AI, et cetera, and sort of put his message out there at scale. Right.

And AI allows us to do things at superhuman levels of performance. I don't want to see misogyny amplified at superhuman levels of performance. And so I think there's a real one opportunity to regulate these technologies before we're sort of throwing up our arms saying, how did this happen? It's gotten so bad.

The problem is worse than it was before because of this technology. We don't need to be clairvoyant to see what's down the road. I also think there are pro social uses and maybe Saeed can speak to this, but I think there's pro social applications for this.

I mean, these AI platforms, whether they be therapists or friends or whatever, can also promote really positive examples and deliver, you know, the educated. I mean, I, I joke with Saeed about this, but I was like, man, we should just create a bot of you.

You have such impact when you sit down in, in company with men and boys and they're. It's there. I mean, he's. I'm going to toot his horn for him, but they're life changing for the people that he works with. Well, what if we can use this technology to amplify that?

What if we can support investment in that type of infrastructure? So I also think there's a. I don't want to just talk about how it's a weapon, but. Or how it's a sword, but it can also be a shield. And so I think we need to expand the way we're thinking about this to start exploring those opportunities.

So that's how I think about this issue.

Dr. Hill, are you ready for your chatbot? Do you have anything to add?

Yeah, well, I'll add that I deeply love and appreciate Adam, and I'll also say that, yeah, absolutely, I think we can be strategic in how we use AI to our advantage.

Instead of AI coaches trying to help us grift women and lie to them, what if we just Had AI coaching us on just how to understand ourselves better, you know, actual coaches in real time talking to us about our feelings, but not in a way that is exploitative.

I mean, we can use technology to our advantage in that way. I think at the same time, a big part of this, honestly, I think, is storytelling.

And I think we maybe go away from that a little bit where we need, need, I think more men in particular, but people really telling their story about their own harm, their own traumas, you know, those that feel ready and willing and able to do that.

Because I feel like some of the most success I've had on a personal level with men and boys and reaching them has been through talking about my own mental health struggles. As a psychologist, as someone who's experienced trauma, as someone who's experienced racism, you know, these stories matter. Our stories really matter.

And all these boys and men are constantly hearing are these like, antisocial stories and feelings about women, and they're often shut down. And we heard that from the first panel. This creates a real crisis of democracy when we can't even talk about pro social attitudes online without being shouted down and virtual violence impacted upon us.

And so can we create more spaces? Can we use discord channels? Can we use other platforms?

Certainly amplify the stories that are pro social, that are connected, and showing how these other versions of being, these restrictive versions of being, are costing us our humanity, are costing us our ability to be happy, and costing us our lives and the lives of others.

So I think engaging a little bit more in some storytelling and using AI maybe to be helpful in that could be something as well.

Thank you, Kaitlyn. You showed what I think was something really interesting in your presentation, which was what looked like small, innocuous, five minutes to a healthy body, whatever it was. I can't remember the exact example you gave. And then how that leads down into a path of radicalization.

How is the public to know when that shift is happening, when they're going to something that's fairly innocuous to something more radicalizing? And I'll say my first introduction into this was the New York Times podcast the Rabbit Hole, which I listened to many years ago.

And then before my son was allowed on anything, I made him listen to, because I found it fascinating. This, you know, the gentleman had gone online to learn something innocuous, and they had sort of insinuated into it some radicalization. So when is that? Like, how do we identify that?

If we knew the golden nugget, I mean, and there lies a reason to invest in more of this research too is because there is no exact moment that we know of right now, but we know that it is happening. And in that podcast it happens over a long period of time. But that's not the case for everyone.

It can happen in a much Shorter period of time. What we are able to identify, or we're starting to be able to identify are where are some of those mixed messengers?

So like those that deliver one message of self improvement but then we see their content actually getting more rage based fueled over time and it's because we see their subscribers or their followers increasing. And So I mean Dr. Noble's work is essential for this. But it's the algorithm that is taught.

The angrier you get, the more attention you will grab. So even some of these influencers, we question if they totally believe what it is they're saying themselves or if it's just helping them put more money in their pocket. But much long, long answer short, a lot more research needs to be done about what is that turning point.

Interesting.

God, the attention economy is really disturbing thing, especially as it relates to our children. I mean we are selling their attention for profit and the things they're doing to them to get it is just beyond me. So, okay, we're gonna, you guys, we're gonna end with my last question on a positive note because we have to.

So let's talk about success stories. Let's talk about, you know, what have you seen? We talked a little bit about what you recommended for us. But you know, what have you seen that has worked and how do we sort of in this room and those paying attention online take that and carry that into the world.

Anything to add on the last note? Dr. Hill, you want to start? Sure.

I think some of the things that have worked the most, I mean the truth is, is like, yeah, we're at a bit of a deficit online because of these algorithms. And I think anything that can really help interrupt, process and amplify more positive message messages need to be looked into.

I think on more positive notes, some of the work I do is one on one and group work with men in particular, but people of all gender identities who have, who have caused harm to people.

And I remember one person in particular who came in telling me that the person that he was accused of sexually harming was lying, you know, that he was going to sue her, sue the University we were at just airing a lot of grievances with me.

And I think what I found the most was providing the space to be heard was really important.

Having Compassion for the anger was a key part of it, but also really trying to interrupt his thought process by kind of reminding him of pointing out things about, like the lack of statistics on the fact that women are lying about, you know, these sorts of things are just not true.

Like the women are not lying about these things, you know, the Low percentages and studies we have about these lies. But at the same time, how also with her testimony of what happened, you know, there's a real misconception sometimes because of our lack of comprehensive sexual health education about even what the experience of sexual violence might be.

So for example, being able to differentiate between things like, zero, I had bad sex or awkward sex sex or whatever it may be verse sexual violence, like we aren't teaching students, we're not teaching people to really have these sort of conversations about their sexual experiences with each other or how to sort of, you know, follow up with each other, how to communicate with each other anymore.

And the more I worked with him, after only a few weeks, he kind of came to realize like, you know, I'm not mad at her, I'm just mad that I made her feel that way. You know, I don't want to sue her, I don't want to sue this University. I just feel a lot of shame.

I feel a lot of deep shame for how I showed up in that relationship. And I think helping hold him in that was really vital.

And it eventually led to him having a situation where he was able to later rectify it with her with the help of a peer mediator and ombuds person, which I will mention at a lot of universities, seeing more of someone who can broker a conversation between people who cause harm in a non punitive or carceral way has been really helpful.

Where I've seen real transformations with the space for people who have been harmed to express that harm and to be heard by the person that harmed them and for that person who harmed them to hear that apologize for it.

Because that's another big thing is that people are being, men in particular are being taught that apologies are giving up power. When I've seen so much, I used to do couples and family therapy, I've seen so much movement in relationship and relational connection through apologizing and owning accountability. It's hard, it's scary.

But if you're able to do it, it can be really transformative and can really take relationships to a different level. And so I think also modeling that for people is also important. And I've seen numerous amounts of times, even with people who've caused harm that we're able to do that with them.

And it can be transformational for all people involved.

Now I see why you want a Doctor said Chatbot. Adam, anything to add on?

You know, just. I'll just say that I get. I'm very lucky to get to have these conversations about online safety contrasted with physical safety and why it's just as important and talk about some of these emerging issues.

And what I'll often hear back from people when I do have these conversations about whatever it is AI chatbots or undressing apps is parents will go home and they'll have these conversations in their homes, and then they'll reach out to me and say, I thought I was going to blow my kid's mind with this new technology.

And 100% of the time, what I hear from parents who reach back out to me is, zero, mom, it's already happening at our school. zero, yeah, my friend is on that. zero, yeah, this has already happened to somebody at my school. And. And then it leads to conversation where it's like, well, how did that make you feel?

Or how long has this been going on? And it's not about having the right answer. It's just about having an opportunity to have these conversations and feel more connected to your kids. So that really gives me hope is that when we empower our communities with this knowledge to have these conversations, really awesome stuff happens.

And I hear from a lot of mental health professionals about what do we do about kids and the loneliness epidemic or addiction to social media. And so. Or how do I connect with my kids more? And it's like, well, connect with them offline, have conversations with them, you know, spend more time with them.

It sounds so simple, or it sounds like it's a cop out, but it's. I hear from every single mental health professional that I've talked to is like, that's what needs to happen.

And so it's really exciting when they go home and have these conversations and they turn into something where they feel more connected to their kids or they feel like they understand this digital world that they didn't grow up in as a kid, but their kid is.

And so I think that's really exciting and shows sort of the promise of more awareness and more education.

Yeah, it's interesting as we've talked in my household about the algorithms, right? We can talk. Like, one of the things we talk about is how do we tell the algorithm that we don't want to see that stuff because you actually can dislike it. You can.

You Know, and I think God knows if that works because we none of us really know how these algorithms work.

But hopefully, right, if you're seeing something that doesn't feel good, you can actually sort of move on from it, which I think is hopefully something we can teach our kids, but I don't know if it works, like I said. Caitlin, anything to add?

Yeah. So we've tested a few campaigns over the last couple of years to see if we can pull men away from engaging with this content. So 18 to 34 year old men in various geographic pockets, and one example is in San Francisco.

We work with a really cool group called Men's Circle where they just get together at the beach or they go for hikes, they go camping. And they were started by men who were looking for male friendship, connection. Felt lonely, didn't have that in the Bay Area. So we started a Twitter handle for them.

We revamped their website and we ran some very basic ads on Twitter targeting men in the Bay Area who were following accounts like Andrew Tate and engaging with keywords like red pill. And after spending just a couple $1000, we were able to get seven guys to sign up and actually join in person events with them.

So that gives us this little sliver of hope that if maybe they're just aware of what's in their backyard and to break through the silos. So how can we use technology, the platforms, the ad platforms they give us against the algorithms themselves. If we can't break down the algorithm, how can we maybe weaponize the algorithm? It's frustrating.

We have to spend money on their platform to do it, but it is a way in to the platform. So in some of the ways that trust we spoke about earlier, trust and safety was really spawned by ad dollars saying, hey, I don't want my product next to something hateful or disgusting. But it's also created silos.

So these things only exist now where they're welcome. So how do we break back into those silos? And so our kind of theory here is, well, why don't we actually run ads in the places where that stuff might be existing to try to pull people away from it?

Very small test with just a little bit of funding so far, but enough to show promise that when men are shown another pathway, they might just walk down it.

Awesome, I love that. Well, thank you so much, all three of you. That was a perfect ending of hope for this hearing. But I really appreciate the conversation, you know, as we were preparing.

And I want to reiterate my gratitude to Julie Sally, who really put this together and worked with all of you and wrote the brilliant backgrounder. You know, this isn't easy, and it's not, I think, something people want to talk about a lot, but it's the reality that, you know, our young people are living in.

And it's one that those of us that didn't grow up in a digital age, you know, have a hard time relating to. So I really appreciate you guys shining a light on it today. And so with that, we will move to public comment.

I don't know if there's anyone here who wants to provide public comment, but now would be your moment, seeing none, then we can adjourn the hearing. Thank you all.

All right.

Nice job making your first look at me.