The seamy side of Sarahah

My Facebook feed has a young recent graduate who, even though not a professional critic, reviews films every Friday. His felicity with words and knowledge of cinema are limited, but his enthusiasm and sincerity are not. His reviews, however, typically receive more than hundred ‘likes’ on Facebook. A few weeks ago, he, like tens of thousands of others, made an account on Sarahah, an app that allows its users to send and receive anonymous messages. He shared the results. One message called his reviews “shi**y as f**k”; the other told him to “stop pretending to be a critic”. There was no easy way to find out whether he received more messages, but if he did, he didn’t share them.

It’s quite obvious that we — perpetually enclosed in black mirrors of our own — can’t get enough of the Internet. Our association with it, especially over the last decade, has taken different forms: We first watched ourselves on it, then started watching others and, quite recently with Sarahah, watched ourselves as others watched us. The app, in that sense, fittingly signals our evolution in a rapidly swelling playground that is the Internet, which makes us feel both insignificant and inadequate, while sustaining the illusion that we are important, that we matter.

It’s like we entered a circus wanting to watch the show and found out, only much later, that we were the performers. But what was fascinating about Sarahah wasn’t as much the app itself, but who it purported to empower and inform :people. It hit us in waves. The eager ones — oblivious and indifferent to being judged — were the first to jump on the wagon and, then eventually, came the cool cats, making it a bandwagon. But the reactions of those who chose to stay away, while taking potshots at the app, were more notable.

They said it served those with low-self esteem, hungry for attention, and seeking validation. But how is any of that new? The universe of Facebook, Twitter or Instagram—where social currency is measured in ‘like’, ‘love’, or ‘followers’ — is built on our need for validation. If we’re sharing anything on the Internet, with a fair amount of frequency, then we lose the moral authority to differentiate between, say, a Facebook post or a Sarahah answer.

It also doesn’t matter whether we’re on social media for the ‘lulz’, or for sharing pictures, pieces, or music. The devices — whether our posts are informed by irony, self-deprecation, self-awareness, or humour — don’t matter, either. The Internet will perhaps become more compassionate and egalitarian if the graduates of the School of Cool can get off their high horses, and stop deriding the choices they disagree with.  

The other backlash against the app, however, accusing it of fuelling cyber bullying, carried more weight. As the app continued getting traction, a Facebook post on it went viral, citing the case of a website called Formspring, where a girl was harassed using anonymous messages. The girl, that post said, died two weeks later. And, as if on a cue, many Sarahah users began posting screenshots of abusive messages they received.

Anonymity brings out the worst in people — that’s not even up for debate. Whether it’s the comment sections of websites or Twitter timelines, many have, time and again, answered yes to the following: Are you willing to transgress if your actions don’t have consequences? But, once again, instead of looking inwards, we looked outwards: Making an app a target of easy derision.

A lot of people complaining about Sarahah were also, quite bizarrely, advised to stop using it — which was essentially a roundabout way of victim shaming.

Sarahah made us uncomfortable, exposing our seamy sides, offering no easy answer to the question, we’ve cared for long, “How worthy are we?”

A few days ago, I checked the timeline of my Facebook friend, curious to find out whether he had posted a review since that backlash. Two Fridays, and a few movies, had come and gone. He hadn’t. The anonymity had, once again, prevailed.    

The author is a film critic and an independent journalist