How trolls affect both celebrities and the common man

A lot has been said about the whole Aamir Khan episode. We all know what he said and how people reacted. Similar reactions were seen when Shah Rukh Khan made certain remarks that roused anger in individuals. This is not about what Aamir or Shah Rukh or any other celebrity or for that matter, even an individual on social media said. This is about the endless number of cyber bullies present on the internet...

The known, yet anonymous bully
Celebrities aren’t the only victims of cyberbullying. There have been cases where students have been on the receiving end of cyberbullying by friends and classmates. Pallavi Mathur is an example. A student from Delhi, who currently lives in Mumbai, Pallavi recalls how she was bullied in school. “Back in school, someone managed to hack into my Facebook account and wrote nasty things about me in the ‘Bio’ section. In college, my conversations were sent around to a bunch of people on my friend list. These were statements about me in the first person. I know that the person who did it was close to me because of the information shared. I made a new Facebook profile, but people made jokes about it, accusing me of ‘taking these things too seriously,” she says.

Expert speak
Psychologist Kalpana Khatwani says that while the general advice would be to ignore bullies, the situation depends on one’s sensitivity. “If the person is confident, there isn’t a problem. But what does one do if the individual is sensitive? Everyone has a different way of coping and as a professional, I would need to understand the psyche of the person before giving him/her the right direction to sort their problem,” she says.

The cyber troll
Kavita Krishnan, Secretary of All India Progressive Women’s Association, is not new to being harassed on the internet because she expressed her viewpoints. “The trolls are mostly anonymous, except for some of the well-known ones like Ashoke Pandit or Alok Nath or Subramanian Swamy or Tripura Governor Tathagata Roy, all of whom indulge in bullying and/or name-calling. I am not really personally affected by most tweets, I find them useful to expose the real Mann Ki Baat of the RSS, BJP and sexists and misogynists generally,” she told dna.

Journalist and Executive Director of Amnesty India Aakar Patel, who has been trolled continuously on news sites for several years for voicing his views in several newspapers, says he doesn’t read the comment section. “I don’t read reader comments. I think immediate feedback - whether praise or criticism - writers should distance themselves from. Writing is an act of confidence. This confidence is influenced powerfully from the outside and it is vital that it have integrity,” he says.

While Krishnan and Patel don’t let the trolls affect them, former journalist Sohini Mitter says that a barrage of online trolling on Twitter had left her scarred. “It was in October 2010 when India’s Twitter population wasn’t that big. Hashtag activism had not started, and the word ‘Internet troll’ hadn’t been coined as yet,” she says.

Sohini recalls sharing an article demanding the ‘Aazadi of Kashmir’ written by Arundhati Roy. While Sohini says she did not agree with Roy’s point of view, she couldn’t help but admire the prose and the sentence construction of the writer. “Within minutes, I began getting hate tweets from two handles @InternetHindu and @PakEliminator. I don’t know whether they still exist. I thought I could reason with them and we could engage in a healthy debate. However, a few minutes later, they started abusing me. Me, my parents, my ancestry – nothing was spared. I was even called the ‘illegitimate child of Prophet Mohammed’,” she recalls.

Sohini adds that more anonymous handles joined in and some of the trolls even threatened to ‘come to her house and rape’ her. “It got worse when my colleague, whose name incidentally was Amir Khan, tried to come to my rescue. The trolls then said that ‘Amir was f****** with a Hindu girl’ and he and his poora khandaan should be taught a lesson,” she adds.

Following the incident, the trolls put up the conversation on blogs and journals and even shared Sohini’s Twitter picture, linked her blog and her Facebook account. They said that “people like me should be taught a lesson.”
Sohini lay low for three months, but says that she doesn’t put up her political views or anything to do with current affairs. “Also, I learnt to block. But there’s always a fear that I will get a rape threat any time, if someone doesn’t like my views,” she says.

A SHOW, TOO
In Channel 4’s Cyber Bully, Maisie Williams (of Game of Thrones fame) plays Casey Jacobs, a teenage girl who has to battle with a cyber-stalker in real-time. A press release states, “The plot of Cyber Bully is inspired by dozens of real-life cases.” It essentially examines the consequences of cyberbullying, trolling, and webcam hacking.

LEGAL AID
Currently, while one can track an email sent by an anonymous individual, using apps, it is still difficult to trace down anonymous Facebook and Twitter trolls and bullies. Maybe it is time for the cyber cell and the IPC to introduce new laws to identify these online and anonymous trolls.

PEHLE BHI...
Remember Rebecca Black, whose song Friday went viral in 2011? You could have different opinions on the quality of the song, the singing and the overall experience, but the way Black was bullied was unforgivable. In an interview, Black said that someone had called her a ‘wh**e’ and even ‘asked her to die because she was so ugly’. The bullying moved to her school, which she had to leave because of the harassment. Black became a celeb after the video and cyber bullying and even came out with another video. She is one of the lucky few to have survived.