How abortion, AI, bothsidesign, feminism, and trans people are weaponised to distract us from the assault on human rights and tech bros plundering the planet

Colander feed with distractions and percolating the word "Focus". — Adapted image by Daryl Bambic from Pixabay.

As I look at my social feed in 2025, the words that come to my mind are “too much.” Too much information, too much confrontation, and above all, too much distraction.

In 2025, the continuous avalanche of data, news, and slop (digital content of low quality, usually produced in quantity using AI) often left me overwhelmed, puzzled, and anxious. Frequently, I asked myself:

Did I gather all the information I needed to comprehend this topic?
Were the sources trustworthy?
Am I up to date on this topic?

But the most disturbing effect of the flood of information was its use as a weapon of mass distraction. This is how it happened:

You select a population experiencing problems that you can manipulate to achieve your goals.
You choose a fundamental human right and decide that a less powerful group doesn’t deserve it.
You create a campaign that blames group (2) for the challenges group (1) is experiencing.
Group (1) gets distracted from the cause of the real challenges they experience.

Let’s revisit some of those weapons of mass distraction in 2025.

Abortion

During pregnancy, depending on the stage of fetal development, we talk of a fertilised egg, blastocyst, embryo, or fetus. And none of them is an independent tenant of women’s bodies. They are as much a part of women’s bodies as women’s nails or hair. Moreover, they are not a baby or a child.

The Cambridge Dictionary tell us that a child is

A boy or girl from the time of birth until he or she is an adult, or a son or daughter of any age.

and baby

a very young child, especially one that has not yet begun to walk or talk.

In summary, before birth, there is no child or baby.

However, especially in 2025, there has been a massive campaign to insist that even a fertilised egg is a baby and that interrupting a pregnancy is akin to murdering a human being.

This misappropriation of women’s bodies has a consequence that any reason to interrupt a pregnancy intentionally — from rape and endangering women’s lives to simply deciding not to proceed with it — is framed in terms of two equally valuable lives, rather than what it is: A woman deciding what to do with a part of her body.

Moreover, an unintentional interruption of a pregnancy — for example, a spontaneous miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy — is suspicious of human intervention and should be investigated, even if 1 in 8 known pregnancies end in miscarriage and the majority of miscarriages cannot be prevented.

What do we avoid examining when we focus on “abortion”?

Forced birth. “Pro-life” is window dressing for forced birth: It condemns women to give birth, no matter if it’s unviable, risks their lives, or goes against their will.
Woman as an eternal child. When we restrict abortion, we not only block women from receiving healthcare, but we also defer to others — the state, lawmakers, judges, doctors — the control over their bodies, as if women were children. In the UK, a woman needs the signature of not one but two doctors to get an abortion.
Unpaid — or low-paid — maternity and parental leave. In the US, there is no federal law granting the right to maternity or paternity leave. In the UK, whilst the statutory maternity leave is 1 year, the salary paid makes it only accessible to mid- to high-income families after the first 6 weeks — paternity leave is 10 days.
Pregnancy and giving birth are risky businesses. Every day in 2023, over 700 women died from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. And it’s not only in the Global South. The US has the highest rate of maternal deaths of any high-income nation. In 2022, there were 22 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births — more than double, sometimes triple, the rate for most other high-income countries.
Pregnancy while in prison. In the UK, women in prison have a seven-times higher probability of suffering a stillbirth than those in the general population, and an average of 25% of babies born to women in prison are admitted to a neonatal unit afterwards — the national figure is 14%. Moreover, the use of shackles or restraints on pregnant women is a common practice in prisons and jails in the United States and documented in Australia, the UK, and Japan.
Black pregnant women and babies have worse outcomes. Across the UK, black women are more than twice as likely to die in childbirth compared with their white counterparts. A report by the health and social care committee blamed a combination of factors, including black women’s concerns “not taken seriously” due to bias, stereotyping and racist assumptions. Additionally, in England and Wales, babies born to black mothers have a 81% higher risk of dying before discharge compared with babies born to white mothers.
Unpaid care work. Whilst Europe and the US claim to want more babies, they heavily rely on unpaid care work to look after children, which is predominantly delivered by women. As a result, many women are forced to leave paid work or reduce their working hours, foregoing not only their previous pay but also the opportunity to advance.
Children poverty. Children comprise more than 50% of those living in extreme poverty around the world, even if children constitute only 31% of the world’s population. In the UK, the poverty rate for children has been steady since 2009 at around 30%. In the US, the Department of Health and Human Services is freezing all childcare payments under the guise of “concerns about widespread fraud.”

Rose Willis & Kathryn Conrad / A Rising Tide Lifts All Bots / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0.

Artificial Intelligence

Tech has touted AI as the magic bullet that will cure cancer, “fix” sustainability, and eliminate grunt work, so that humans can live lives full of pleasure and intellectual pursuits.

The path to this utopian future is framed as both inevitable and arduous. Inevitable because Big Tech has made sure we all feel FOMO, especially governments. Arduous because we’ve been told that we have to accept that many people will lose their jobs as the price to pay for this one “opportunity in the history of humanity.”

What do we miss when we focus on AI as a “miracle drug”?

Broligarchy. The fusion of technology and political power. In 2025, we saw tech bros at Trump’s inauguration, dining with him at the White House, and then getting even richer — the AI boom added more than half a trillion dollars to the wealth of US tech barons.
The negative impact on the planet. Data centres — where AI is developed and run — consume massive amounts of energy and water (in addition to generating carbon emissions) and their number is expected to double or triple by 2030. What AI tech bros do? They incite us to use them for memes and personal videos. Cancer cure anyone?
Techno-patriarchy. Consistently, AI has been weaponised against women. From ranking male candidates over women at Amazon to generating “deepfake porn” from women’s and girls’ images. Musk and AI Grok have now raised the bar by enabling X’s users to nudify women and children. But don’t worry, after the global outcry, only paying subscribers have access to the tool. Meta has also shut down global accounts linked to abortion advice.
Re-colonisation of the Global South. The Global North has consistently exploited poverty and weak laws in the South to accelerate its own digital transformation.
AI washing. We have been promised automation but AI has turned into a shiny cover for human labour. Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” AI technology was touted as enabling customers at many of its physical shops to simply pick their items and then leave. The kick? 700 out of every 1,000 sales were manually reviewed by low-paid workers in India.
End of work. Workslop — AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task — leaves colleagues and managers to do the real thinking and clean-up. Researchers estimate the hidden cost of worklop as $9M Annual for a 10,000-person company.

Bothsidesign

I credit the journalist, activist, and author Soraya Chemaly for introducing me to this term in this article.

Bothsidesing refers to the media or public figures giving credence to the other side of a cause, action, or idea to seem fair or only for the sake of argument, even when the credibility of that side may be unmerited. Merriam-Webster Dictionary

It described exactly the phenomenon behind the New York Times article, initially titled “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?”, which appeared on November 6th 2025, and after backlash was changed to “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?”

Screenshot of the New York Times original title “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?”

Framing the title as a question rather than a statement (Women ruined the workplace, Liberal feminism ruined the workplace) aims to avoid the backlash from allies and bystanders. Anyway, asking the question is freedom of speech, isn’t it?

What do we miss when we legitimise “bothsidesing”?

Post-truth agendas. We weaponise questions and panels against certain groups and scientific findings to reinforce the belief that we can decide what truth to believe. Under a veneer of “gaining control,” we become marionettes at the mercy of puppeteers who use half-truths and chaos to advance their self-interest.
Anti-rights movements. We open the door to using questioning to lend credibility to movements that seek to reverse human rights and to deny the recognition of systemic injustices against some groups. For example, typing in Google “How would slavery be better today?” led me to a video of the right-wing political commentator Matt Walsh, where he pushes back on the concept of reparations under the premise that “all of us today would be in a worse spot if slavery never existed at all across the entire globe.”
The return of obscurantism. Bothsidesing safely enables the presentation of scientific knowledge as a matter of opinion. For example, Flat Earthers believe that conventional science is flawed, if not entirely fabricated, and that there are alternative hypotheses to the shape of our planet. The same goes for the anti-vaxxer movement, climate change deniers, or those who believe that humans never reached the Moon. The problem is bigger than simply opting for an “alternative.” It’s the perfect environment for fostering conspiracy theories, “If they’ve lied about this, what else are they lying about?”

Feminism

This weapon is actually a Swiss knife — it has so many uses!

It has been used to explain to young men the reason they don’t have a job (women steal them), the lack of a college certificate (women are “displacing” them in universities), or not having a girlfriend (women don’t want to be with men or are “overcautious” about gender violence). Feminism is also the reason women falsely accuse men of rape.

And of course, there are the “tradwives” who have embraced submission to the supremacist male and adopted traditional gender roles.

What do we miss when we focus on “feminism” as a problem?

Voracious capitalism. Young men don’t have a house or a job because capitalism on steroids considers them expendable, not because of women.
Women have been blamed for others’ misfortunes for millennia. Eve was to blame for the original sin. And closer to our times, during witch hunts in places like Scotland — where nearly 4,000 individuals, predominantly women, were accused of witchcraft between 1563 and 1736 — women were indicted for others’ setbacks. Let me explain. The primary way in which accused witches gathered a reputation for harmful magic was a quarrel followed by misfortune — women argued with someone and then a misfortune befell that person.
Women are still used to placate young men’s dissatisfaction. In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici recounts how France and Venice functionally legalised raping proletarian women by the late 1300s, and Italy and France opened tax-funded, publicly-managed brothels from 1350–1450, all so that proletarian men would vent their frustrations upon proletarian women. She also noted that the Church approved of prostitution as a means to ensure workers were not lured into heretic sects (who had a reputation for both sexual licentiousness and fomenting rebellion).
We prioritise men’s feelings over women’s harm. Almost 200 rapes were recorded by the police in England and Wales daily in the year ending June 2025. On the flip side, data indicate the average adult man living in the same region has a 0.00021281% chance of being falsely accused of rape in a year — btw, men have a 0.05% chance of being raped by another man. Are women really “overcautious” about gender violence?
They want us to think women don’t need to defend their rights anymore. Young women who enjoy the kind of life feminism has enabled (they vote, have a house, open a bank account, divorce from an abusive husband) have been led to believe that feminism has nothing to do with it, that we’re now “equal,” and that it is more “modern” to opt out of the uncomfortable discussion of women’s human rights. However, the reality is that women’s rights are being attacked worldwide, as we saw above in the Abortion section.
Women still internalise misogyny and patriarchy. Through society, our families, and especially our mothers, we continue to learn to police other women and enforce norms as a defence mechanism. Unfortunately, for some women, holding on to patriarchal norms feels safer — and more conducive to wealth and status— than venturing into the unknown.

A long rainbow ribbon feeds into a grey meat grinder bearing a simplified neural network diagram on its side. Out the other end spills a collection of black and white 1s and 0s. — Beckett LeClair / Binarisation / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0

Trans People

Since we’re born, we are indoctrinated about the sex binary and that sex and gender are the same thing.

Whilst the reality is that chromosomal variation in humans is much broader than XX and YX, and that many cultures have recognised the existence of trans and non-binary people for centuries, the sex and gender binary beliefs have become central to how we organise societies, economies, and labour.

Hence, as trans and non-binary people are seen as a threat to our pretty boxes about gender and sex, in 2025, we deemed they shouldn’t receive healthcare, don’t deserve to have a job, and they should be forced to use a toilet according to their biological sex at birth.

What do we hide when we focus on “protecting” women from trans people?

Violence and harassment of trans people. 51% of trans people have hidden their identity at work for fear of discrimination. Nearly 7 in 10 trans young people have been subjected to death threats at school.
Trans people are not more violent. It’s estimated that there are approximately 200,000–500,000 trans people in the UK. There are about 90,000 people in UK prisons, out of a population of 69,3M residents (0.13%). With 2.9 trans people for 1,000 prisoners, that makes trans people equally or much less probable to be in prison despite being vilified.
Violence in women’s toilets. There is no data or body of real-world examples supports the fear that if people are simply allowed to self-identify as trans, non-trans cis males will start using this as an opportunity to disguise themselves as women in order to access women’s spaces, such as public bathrooms. However, women and non-binary people are increasingly being challenged in toilets and changing facilities after the UK’s Supreme Court ruling on biological sex.
Violence against women is perpetrated by men. Two million women are estimated to be victims of violence perpetrated by men each year in the UK. And cases similar to Gisèle Pelicot are popping up in the UK and Germany.
Woman’s health is no man’s. Women are considered a 4 billion outlier that doesn’t conform to the male “average”. Hence, most drugs have been developed without including female data or sex disaggregation, resulting in drug doses harmful to women, who often receive too much or not enough of the active ingredients. The threat to women’s health is not trans women but that conditions such as endometriosis are underfunded and understudied.
Criminalisation of women. Countries around the world actively criminalise women for acts of survival while being poor, for being female, or for challenging patriarchal norms.
Gender pay gap. Women are still blamed for the gender pay gap — it’s our fault because apparently we ask for less. However, studies show that while women are more likely to ask for higher salaries, men still receive greater compensation.

What’s next?

“If they cannot convince you, they’ll confuse you.” Patricia Gestoso

While we busy ourselves distracted by endless streams of information, overconfident government and tech bros undermine human rights and plunder the planet.

We must evolve from passively “consuming” information to actively “curating and critically assessing” it. And that’s not trivial because

It demands additional effort.
It requires being ready to go against our beliefs.
We don’t know what we don’t know.

How can you rise to the challenge?

Assess the trustworthiness of the information sources you get.
Challenge not only the quality but also the quality of the information you receive. If all looks the same, you’re probably missing part of the conversation.
Check the information you receive against scientific facts.
Identify how the information you get aligns with systems of dominance and control (e.g. oligarchy, kleptocracy, fascism, patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism, ableism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity).
Surround yourself with people and communities that challenge your thinking.
Proactively ask yourself what information you may be missing and find out how to get it.
Once you’ve critically analysed the information you have about a topic and reached a conclusion, continue to gather more information and be open to reviewing your opinion.

In summary, you are responsible and accountable for the quality of your thinking.

Now it’s your turn. You must decide whether to be an information victim or a critical thinker.

What’s your choice?