Foreign adversaries are increasingly leveraging artificial intelligence and coordinated bot networks to exploit female empathy on social media, turning natural compassion into a psychological weapon against women and girls in the West. That warning comes from a comprehensive report released Thursday by the conservative think tank Independent Women, which draws on research collected in the National Library of Medicine.
The report highlights that women, on average, score higher on measures of empathy, pay closer attention to social cues, rely more on social support networks, and engage in more social comparison online than men. Adversarial states are actively capitalizing on these digital habits. If bad actors can manipulate who a woman believes is suffering, the report argues, they can effectively manipulate what she is willing to defend, condemn, or ultimately believe.
Modern generative artificial intelligence has allowed hostile governments to mass-produce convincing online personas that can easily pose as activists, victims, experts, mothers, teenagers, or ordinary American citizens. Among the state actors cited is China, whose “Spamouflage” network has operated across more than 50 platforms since at least 2017. Analytics firm Graphika identified accounts within this network last year that were posing as American voters, soldiers, and news outlets to push polarizing content regarding guns, race, Israel, immigration, and abortion to both Republicans and Democrats.
Russia’s “Doppelganger” operation employs a similar strategy, building networks of fake social media personas designed to stir up domestic division in Western nations by pushing specific narratives on controversial geopolitical topics, including the war in Iran and Ukraine. Iran has also engaged in rapid influence operations. According to the report, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched an online campaign within 24 hours of the start of U.S. military operations in Iran, flooding millions of Americans with AI-generated anti-American and anti-Israel content.
Independent Women fellow Alexis Wilkins, who was personally targeted by a foreign-linked bot campaign last year, noted that while a woman’s capacity for empathy is a profound strength, it also creates a unique vulnerability in the digital information environment. Wilkins explained that foreign campaigns easily prey on this trait to drive political polarization, turn women against men, or cause friction among women themselves.
To illustrate how online narratives can amplify division, Wilkins pointed to the social media reaction surrounding the case of Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts mother who killed her three children. On TikTok, some users rushed to defend Clancy and blame her husband, Patrick, despite Clancy’s own defense attorney acknowledging her responsibility. Wilkins described the phenomenon as an addiction to online drama that feels like real-world activism from a smartphone screen, but actually pulls users down a destructive rabbit hole.
According to Wilkins, hostile bot networks do not necessarily need to invent a controversy from scratch. Instead, automated accounts frequently jump onto organically occurring domestic events to accelerate outrage and amplify existing tensions. A relatively small number of automated accounts can successfully manipulate an algorithm to trigger an organic downstream effect among real users.
The vulnerability to digital manipulation begins early, disproportionately affecting young girls before boys. The Independent Women report cites a large-scale study of more than 84,000 British participants published in Nature Communications, which concluded that heavier social media use predicted lower life satisfaction a year later for girls between the ages of 11 and 13. By contrast, similar negative impacts did not appear for boys until they reached ages 14 and 15.
This psychological vulnerability coincides with the developmental window when many American girls receive their first smartphones, a time when they are least equipped to navigate complex digital landscapes. Broader sociological shifts reflect growing disillusionment among young women. Polling data from Gallup indicates that while 10% of American women under the age of 45 stated they would permanently leave the United States if they could in 2014, that figure surged to 40% by 2025, compared to 19% of young men.
To counter these sophisticated psychological operations, Wilkins advises social media users to approach emotionally charged or compelling content with extreme skepticism, treating online posts with the same caution one would give to an obvious AI-generated video. In the current information warfare environment, individuals must independently verify facts rather than passively absorbing content fed to them by unknown online sources.
