In 2011i decided i wanted to be politician. And a leader in politics. And it was my first race. I ran and i lost, but it was the most elevated i had ever been, it was mentioned in russian media. And even an 18yearold girl they voted for the first time for me. Then police broke my arm because i decided to participate in protests, because there were a lot of corruptions in our elections. They broke my arm, he was a huge discussion about what is going on. With police violence. When i ran it again it was in 2014, i did not know that we had 16 million victims of Domestic Violence every year in russia. 16 million every year. And i collected all of my money just the help of grassroots fundraising because all of my efforts were highly impressed by authorities, i was followed by Law Enforcement and i got a lot of threats, we will kill your family and we will kill your kids, we know who you are, from many conservative progressive groups. Protected groups come protected by officials. But i decided i could when win because we needed women in politics. My main donors were women from all over russia and i hung funds raised this huge position Opposition Leader position in russia. And then after my electric campaign i said that we need to support more women, to to donate, to support them, to use technology to support women and encourage them and inspire them to be leaders. And when the women started i was very welcome. With my relatives in ukraine, i have witnessed this type of violence and i was labeled as a foreign agent, as antistate, and i am a civil defendant in five corrupt cases and i will have approximately 2535 years in prison. It starts with physical violence. And then kind of goes online. It becomes a sustained campaign online. And then it just keeps escalating and you have no choice but to leave, right. So this is obviously not something that all women politicians face. We see it across the board, as a womens rights lawyer, and you kind of symbolize how much more violent it gets online when you come from a marginalized community or you come from a group that people are trying to keep in its place. There is a transgender activist which has very dodgy rules for the space. What was your experience like and help debilitating was the Online Violence and how did it affect your work . Online violence has always been there. For me, it was so traumatizing because i come from a traumatizing transition, it was so traumatizing in india. You dont know whether you come out of it alive. And after that i was helping other women transition, and i get a flurry of messages like we are going to kill you, we are going to chop you up and throw you in the gutter, im sorry, there will be a lot of triggers in this my talk because that is how it is. So i was traumatized by these things, so much so that for a very long time i was anonymous. I used, even for press conferences, i used to wear a mask because i was so scared. I was so scared for 70 years. So many years. Until i learned to ignore them and i took off the mask one day. And now i am not really scared of them because i also know that most of them are not people but chat gbc. Gpt. Because it learn from people. Learned from people. Ok, you are a bought. But what it does is infect the community, which is way more dangerous. Every day there is disinformation against transgender people, calling them monsters and all that. It affects the community, and it affects society. Transgender people regret their transition. Scientifically there has been so Much Research done and people who go through transition, one of some of them have major regrets and some of them have minor regrets. But the vast majority of trans people will go through transition and find that there is so much gatekeeping done for trans people to Access Health care. You have to talk to a psychologist, you have to get you a sanity certificate and all of these things, and i will give you one example of a person i have been talking to, i have been talking to a lot of trans people to give them strength, i will give one example, this woman is trans and this in a private space in her room, she calls herself a trans male, she livestreamed herself she wear womens clothes, and she even talks to men in a female voice. Thats what they do. And to top it all off, she is a doctor. She knows everything about it. But still she thinks of the majority of trans people regret she fears that she will get her decision. But regret is not something just for her, i have never regretted my transition, because transition is not easy. You lose a lot. But you still want to do it because that is what you are. Transition is a regret, but Society Makes you regret. It will take there is no easy way to change her gender. To legally change your gender. To change all that you legally are, your name, your citizenship, your degrees, everything that you are. The only thing that you can do is do sex work on the street. I was there. I was just in the street one day sitting and i was thinking ok, what should i do, i have no money to eat. And i was contemplating begging for sex work and that saw a cow eating from the garbage because in india cows are holy. And so are trans people because we are holy and we can bless people. The cow is left to eat garbage on the street. And i as a trans person have been left to not earn anything for myself and to take from the garbage. And then the cow does not have any existence, it cannot prove its citizenship. I was sitting there like that cow in india, no name, no degrees, nothing. And i was there. And a friend of mine told me to go back to your previous self and go and get a job. I could not because that is not who i am. I want my transition but i regretted it because of society and disinformation that has made society fear. There is a Huge Campaign that is basically use enacted by ponds of political opposition and it seems like everybody around is transitioning, but the legal statistics of the actual statistics of strength of transgender of transgender peoples. 3 . And it somehow seems that we as transgender people are on a mission to attack every child and get into every house and make sure that every child wants to be trans. But that is not even with everything that has happened recently, the statistics point elsewhere. It is not something it is the environment that has been created for distrust. Explain this landscape to us, explain what is going on. Why is it going unchecked. We know that women in marginalized communities are kind of separated, and find the pressure so much and start to get off the leadership journey, the political journey, the citizenship journey that democracies will suffer and we know that. So if us a sense of what the landscape is and how and what is the first line of defense. I am honored to be here with these women, and its very interesting what happened, because as you are putting it it is Society Making them go through this. We worked on disinformation in my dissertation, and we worked to develop more resilience for women to combat disinformation and that is not the core of the problem. The court of the problem is not understanding to big issues, the first one is the lack of regulation in big tech, and social media, every time i talked to a regulation i talk about rule of law, usually they say speech speech and sanctions and all that, that is not the case. That is something that the big tech and social media platforms infected in our brain to prevent regulation. The other part is the impact of that information on democracy and that is what they do. Unfortunately they are affecting these limits on a personal level of what they are trying to do, portraying them as unfit for public life. And with that portrait of delegitimization or attacking you for being politically active what they are doing is trying to criminalize democracy. We now know that we are in a precarious position because there are less countries than ever that have a democracy. So that is very ghost basically because we have a ton of foreign influence and the best way to destabilize a government is affecting womens rights. And with that, while we can do and say well, these women are not fit for public life because they are transgender they wanted to sterilize every single child, guess what, they are changing the landscape of Domestic Violence, and they are actually affecting their interest in that country. And you might think that i am talking conspiracy theories, but this is reality. What china and russia, some examples like it talked about, are doing in our countries is incredible. And no one does anything because we talk about regulation, we get care, but when we look at social media platforms and how these are managed everywhere, there is an interest they are an industry like any other industry. So why are companies not turning around and doing anything. That is their problem and that is the real complexity of the issue, that what youre doing is saying you know what, my country, im from sheila, we had the competition but was hijacked bogus information. So when you look at these information campaigns, they are very much paid off to economic interests from other countries. Health rates, pension rights, water, they derailed an entire process as in 2019 and we are not going to start a second process where there is no regulation to go back and pursue prevent disinformation and that happens in latin america and it happens in asia and russia and a bunch of other places and its very difficult to see how we are going to move forward so we dont have a more do problem with in level and layered approach this. Thank you. This is your first term as a member of politics, and you are hearing women coming and talking about how it is too much and how the Online Violence they face is a price they are not ready to pay, and the voices got involved in this also because we started to see that more and more women were willing to step off the leadership journey because they did not want to kind of they did not know how to navigate the space. Lets talk solutions. Tell us about what you are planning with your African Department parliamentarian sisters. Thank you so much for having me. It is a great honor and pleasure to be here. Like you said, i think oftentimes when we are talking about online abuse or when we are talking about victims really do women people think of women in politics because it is assumed that women of power and women of influence and its actually to the point that even when you see a female parliamentarian being trolled online you will be shocked that nobody comes to the defense and nobly speaks for them or nobody calls it out, as opposed to what is happening to other groups of men. Why . Because society has conditioned it that once you get into politics you deserve all you get and you should have thick skin to deal with it. If i quickly talk about statistics, in tanzania we have 43 parliamentarian women. Less than 2 are active on twitter and last three4 on its degree. You can see the magnitude of what it is doing. It is making us selfcentered. The detrimental effect of that is that if we are not online what happens, our visibility is limited, our chance of getting reelected is limited, our chances of moving constituencies is limited, our chance of getting Political Parties parties to nominate us is difficult, but the worst of it all, so many organizations, you aim to increase the number of women in politics and increase the number of women in leadership but if a young girl, a woman, and aspirant is seeing a member of parliament being ridiculed and abused will they want to get into politics . No. Even the newcomers are being blocked. I am so grateful to be part of the fellowship because it has also truly empowered me and further kind of given me the confidence and the knowhow that this is my calling. I have experience may active online before being a parliamentarian and being a parliamentarian is two different worlds. I want to see more women in politics online because we are doing incredible work but it is not visible. One of the ways is legislation. We need to make sure that we go through legislative reform, particularly with legislations that mandate over politics. Most of these acts not recognized online abuse, for example tanzania recognizes genderbased violence, and there are certain types of offenses of genderbased violence they could get a candidate removed from the candidacy list. What what we are trying to do is picture that these laws also recognize online abuse. [applause] that is something i am grateful to you for, and how we have been trying to do that, but it is important to get our forces as Women Leaders to discuss these issues and exchange and navigate when our colleagues and people and peers we aspire to. The issue of online abuse is strong, but the issue of abuse of women in politics the three recognized and given special attention because of the effect that it has. We are kind of out of time, but im going to split that last question. So the two tech superstars, tell us what you think ai can do in this whole space, is there hope for it, can it be used for good, you and lena and you paulina, but, first of all what you are seeing is true, the normalization of genderbased violence is tremendous. Women themselves think that in politics i need to have a thick skin, or this is just part of the equation in politics. The issue of Artificial Intelligence opens a whole new category that starts with a lack of regulation, and the lack of recognition by Big Tech Companies and social media platforms that there is a huge issue that they are helping to disseminate and continue endlessly. What are one of the bay things we have to do is start with examples like the Digital Services act in europe, there are a lot of things that need to be corrected. But this is a starting point where governments are starting dialogue with platforms to see what can be done. Thats a vikram pandit. Second we need to learn and share knowledge. If we are able to understand the impact of Artificial Intelligence, we will be able to understand what we can do in order to control and prevent. The third part was transparency. We need platforms to be transparent about who is making decisions and how the decisions are made, otherwise we can do nothing about the issue of correcting this information and preventing genderbased violence. I am the founder of the Technology Firm and we have campaigned against this system. Now we have sorted this draw more that we are fighting again because we were sure that alec would cause great harm. We were sure that we needed to stall the use of ai machines to be able to create this total digital surveillance all over the world. But i think that we have the steps to do three steps to do. Spread knowledge about ai. Ai is not neutral because the user is a human being. Maybe this is the last century of human beings. But if you spread this knowledge and influence, if you dont know anything about ai you need to spread knowledge. The second step is about regulation. I am a lawyer and i was fighting for many laws to prevent the use of ai for terra regimes. But i was not successful, and i am not sure that regulation is the solution for that. The solution for that is how we use Digital Technology to protect our privacy and autonomy. The key is privacy and autonomy, how you use personal data and spread your personal data, if you spread it it is your responsibility and you need to know everything about that. Its not about regulation. We have a lot of cultural regulation and in my country we have a privacy law and when my privacy was violated by this kind of government i filed my lawsuit that went to the court of human rights. Its not about regulation because how can i prove that i protect my privacy and autonomy on my own. We need to unite all the women from digital dictatorship countries to share expertise and be vocal about that because now we are not so vocal and we try to protect ourselves and we dont know how to do that because we dont share information and we have a lot of influence from russia. This information and misinformation and digital threats and surveillance, and we can share that expertise, and we need to have these 12345 steps on how to prevent it. I think this will help us more than any regulation. I am for regulations, i was fighting for that, but it is not the solution. They forgiving us in agenda to work towards. I know we are terribly out of time, but one more question to you. We know that the European Union has made baby steps in this space, and you work in there. Tell us about how did it feel, did a load lift off you, did you feel safer, did you feel validated, recognized for who you are, and i think that is where the story is, at the end of the day. Which is a space that gives you the freedom to be. Tell us a little bit about that transition, and what it feels like to live in freedom. It feels like a transition from an animal to human. For me, it was that. Because in india, i was not a human. I was something to be feared, not a capri human not human. I felt accepted and i felt safe to voice my concerns and i found a community of people who can i can call friends. I have a lot of friends in india, who are all trans. I dont trust people in india, i am scared to interact with them. I always put on a mask in front of some people. But in the European Union, especially the netherlands, i found a community where i can be myself. That is the hope i have for india, that all the young people were fighting this battle some date you dont have to fear. We are going to trust you to keep that ethical space first. Yes, and i believe with the help of other voices we are going to be able to do that, i think it is important to realize that Artificial Intelligence works with the data that has been put in and there is a lot of gender bias in that data and that needs to be addressed as well. But regarding african parliamentarians we are going to Work Together to get more women online and women more physical visible. Thank you so much, i know we are over time, but thank you. Important and relevant topics. I know we have all seen those headlines about ai. And now we are going to hear from leaders working towards solutions to the Climate Crisis. This is an issue that is ever present and emergent and here to moderate this discussion, please join me in welcoming the op with women