EXCLUSIVE: How America’s Enemies Turn Female Empathy Into A Social Media Weapon

America’s enemies are turning female empathy into a weapon on social media, using AI-generated content and bot armies to manipulate women and girls, conservative think tank Independent Women warned Thursday.

In a lengthy report that cites research collected in the National Library of Medicine, Independent Women found that, on average, women score higher on measures of empathy, pay closer attention to social cues, rely more on social support and engage in more social comparison online. Foreign adversaries are taking advantage of those online opportunities, according to the report. 

“Too often, women’s natural compassion has become a weapon in this fight,” the report states. “If you can manipulate who a woman believes is suffering, you can manipulate what she is willing to defend, condemn, and ultimately believe.”

The report warns that AI now lets hostile governments mass-produce fake online personas that “can pose as activists, victims, experts, mothers, teenagers, or ordinary Americans.”

China’s “Spamouflage” network has operated across more than 50 platforms since at least 2017 according to the report. In 2024, analytics firm Graphika identified accounts in the network posing as American voters, soldiers and news outlets, pushing content on guns, race, Israel, immigration, and abortion to both Republicans and Democrats. 

The report also detailed Russia’s “Doppelganger” operation, which uses social media to stir up division in the West by building networks of fake personas who push narratives on controversial issues, such as the war in Ukraine. Iran is also in on the influence operation. Within 24 hours of the start of U.S. military operations in Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) launched an online campaign that pushed AI-generated anti-American and anti-Israel content to millions of Americans, according to the report.

Independent Women fellow Alexis Wilkins, who was targeted by a foreign-linked bot campaign last year, told The Daily Wire that women’s empathy is a great strength, but it is also their biggest vulnerability online.

“We have a superpower and it is empathy, but it can also be damaging to our reception of world problems and worldviews. And it’s very easy to prey on that,” Wilkins said. “That can also be turned and weaponized in a way to get women to turn on men, to turn on each other, to turn politically. I think that just women are uniquely predisposed to being attacked by these information campaigns.”

Wilkins pointed to the online frenzy around Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother who killed her three children. Women on TikTok rushed to defend Clancy and blame her husband, Patrick, even though Clancy’s own attorney acknowledged she was responsible.

“We’ve replaced soap operas with online drama that feels like it’s real life,” Wilkins said. “It feels like you were engaging in something that’s allowing you to make a difference from your smartphone. But truly, it’s just a rabbit hole.”

Independent Women warned that the vulnerability starts earlier for girls than for boys. The report cites a study of more than 84,000 British participants, published in Nature Communications, which found that heavier social media use predicted lower life satisfaction a year later for girls between the ages 11 and 13. For boys, the same results didn’t come until they were between 14- and 15-years-old.

“The years in which a girl is most sensitive to this environment are the years in which she is least equipped to understand it, and they are the years in which many American girls now receive their first smartphone,” the report states.

The gap also shows up in how young women see their country. In 2014, 10% of American women under 45 told Gallup they would permanently leave the United States if they could. By 2025, that number had reached 40%, compared with 19% of young men. 

Wilkins said bots don’t need to start a controversy to profit from one.

“Of course, they did not create the Lindsay Clancy case. But these bots can jump onto organically occurring events and double down on what’s already happening,” she said. “And the bots don’t have to be by the hundreds of thousands. They can be bots that get an algorithm going that then create an organic downstream effect.”

Her advice to women scrolling social media is to treat compelling content with the same skepticism they would give an AI-generated animal video.

“We’re in the point of the information war where if you’re not getting the facts for yourself and you’re getting them from someone else, you have to be double checking,” Wilkins said.

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