Carmen Lau left her homeland, Hong Kong, in 2021 after her government decided that her pro-democracy activism was a crime under the national security law. Lau moved to the United Kingdom, where she continued to speak out against authoritarian rule over her beloved city. She has dealt with death threats, a bounty placed on her head, and all kinds of harassment one can imagine from a dictatorship’s playbook.

But with the Chinese Communist Party being, well, the Chinese Communist Party, it has updated its old tactics of harassing overseas activists with the help of technology. Last March, Carmen’s neighbors received AI-generated, sexually explicit images suggesting she was a sex worker “open for business.”

Disturbed and mortified, Carmen knew exactly what this tactic aimed to achieve: to silence her. So she decided to do the opposite—speak out.

In this episode, Carmen shares her harrowing experience of transnational harassment and discusses the psychological impact of such abuse, the role of technology in facilitating these attacks, and the broader implications for women activists.