Faking an honest woman: Why Russia, China and Big Tech all use faux females to get clicks

WASHINGTON (AP) — When disinformation researcher Wen-Ping Liu looked into China's efforts to influence Taiwan's recent election using fake social media accounts, something unusual stood out about the most successful profiles.

They were female, or at least that's what they appeared to be. Fake profiles that claimed to be women got more engagement, more eyeballs and more influence than supposedly male accounts.

“Pretending to be a female is the easiest way to get credibility,” said Liu, an investigator with Taiwan's Ministry of Justice.

Whether it’s Chinese or Russian propaganda agencies, online scammers or AI chatbots, it pays to be female — proving that while technology may grow more and more sophisticated, the human brain remains surprisingly easy to hack thanks in part to age-old gender stereotypes that have migrated from the real world to the virtual.