When Susan Kihika, the governor of Nakuru County in Kenya’s Rift Valley, took maternity leave in the US for treatment of a high-risk pregnancy, criticism escalated quickly. While some criticism was justified, it exploded, with social media users accused her of “abandoning her country,” claimed she “[slept] her way” into politics, and shared her location. Kihika’s experience is not unusual. It reflects a problem that 2 in 3 women face worldwide. The United Nations defines this problem as technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV): an act of violence that is committed, assisted, aggravated, or amplified by communication technologies against a person on the basis of their gender. Although many dismiss online hate comments as “jokes,” TFGBV also includes hacking, stalking, astroturfing, and doxxing, among other tactics. Preoccupied with how technology is shortening our attention spans, we have overlooked how it is also reshaping the way we think and perceive each other, normalizing cruelty and inflicting real psychological harm on one another.

TFGBV takes a real psychological toll on its victims, altering how they think. Navigating online spaces where safety is constantly compromised forces a shift from free thought and expression toward a defensive mindset focused on risk mitigation. Lamela Merritt, a US blogger and activist, said the online violence “definitely makes [her] pause before [she weighs] in on anything.” She added that she “had to have an intense conversation with my family about safety,” and 24% of women surveyed agreed that the abuse made them fear for their family’s safety. The issue is strikingly widespread: 85% of women globally have witnessed violence against other women, and 38% have personally experienced it. Women in journalism are especially vulnerable, as 75% have experienced online violence, and 42% of those cases escalated into offline harm. These real safety threats push women to withdraw their voices from civic, academic, and professional discourse, putting hard-won rights at risk whenever the female perspective goes missing from public debate.

It is not only the victims whose thinking changes. The design of algorithms that maximize outrage and engagement rewires the collective mind as well. The human brain naturally pays more attention to information that triggers high-arousal emotions like rage and frustration, and that attention translates into more views and likes on aggressive or hateful posts. Algorithms interpret this engagement as value, so they spread harassment faster and further than factual information. The platform then reinforces the behavior with notifications and likes, encouraging users to express ever more extreme emotions. Because this cycle unfolds instantly, without the pauses or safeguards that exist in other environments, victims are left with essentially no protection.

This mechanism helps explain how online misogyny and gendered disinformation have become normalized as simply “part of internet culture,” reshaping how younger generations understand basic human dignity. Algorithms on short-form platforms such as TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and meme pages expose children to misogynistic ideology and the manosphere, even when they are not searching for that content. Among male adolescents, 45% regularly encounter anti-female content, and a growing number of boys are joining explicitly misogynistic communities. For instance, 1 in 6 boys between the ages of 6 to 15 admire the views of Andrew Tate, a self-proclaimed “misogynist entrepreneur” who advocates for a strict patriarchal social hierarchy.

Once misogynistic content becomes normalized within the digital ecosystem, AI systems trained on that content absorb the same bias. TFGBV is therefore not just a “women’s issue.” These biases are amplified across every digital information system and institutional structure, leading to poor decisions that affect everyone. When AI models were asked to complete simple sentences beginning with a person’s gender, roughly 20% of the responses displayed sexist attitudes. Each time a female journalist, politician, or activist like Kihika or Merritt is targeted by TFGBV and chooses silence to protect herself, public debate becomes less representative, and democracy erodes along with it. The economy is at risk too: AI tools like ChatGPT have generated resumes that describe hypothetical women as less experienced and lower-status than equivalent men. As AI becomes more embedded in hiring, this bias risks costing firms qualified candidates, wasting talent and undermining economic efficiency.

In a world where technology trains us to normalize TFGBV and dismiss it as a “joke,” the solution is not to tell victims to simply log off. Instead, we must rebuild the digital architecture and reclaim how we think. Technology companies should design algorithms that prioritize human safety over engagement and outrage. These systems should be survivor-centered, built to penalize gender-based harassment rather than worsen it by spreading toxic beliefs to younger generations. Robust identity verification to deter mass anonymous “dogpiling,” along with fast and accessible reporting systems, is also essential. As users, we need technological literacy that makes us conscious of how these platforms expose us to misogynistic beliefs and shape our thinking, often without our realizing it. Online empathy should be treated as a foundational element of modern citizenship. Finally, legal frameworks that penalize digital violence, including non-consensual deepfakes, are necessary, since abuse will continue unchecked without real consequences.

Technology has rewired our moral instincts about what is acceptable, building a collective psyche of hostility in which harassment against women, like the pile-on Kihika faced simply for leaving to protect her health, gets waved off as a joke. But because we designed this digital culture, we can redesign it too. We should refuse a digital world where peace of mind is the price of connection, and build one instead where technology serves as an engine for free human expression rather than a cage of hypervigilance.