Snapchat trolls follow old diktat that says, ‘To get to the man, attack his woman’
After a weekend of #BoycottSnapchat and bringing the app’s rating in app stores down to 1, armchair patriots then took to trolling Snapchat Evan Spiegel’s fiancee, Australian supermodel Miranda Kerr. In true Bhartiya sanskriti style, of course.
To recap, on April 15, former Snapchat employee, Anthony Pompliano, had allegedly claimed in a lawsuit that Spiegel was not interested in expanding his business to ‘poor’ countries such as India and Spain.
Trolls descended upon the former Victoria Secret model’s social media accounts. While some asked her to pass on their hate messages to her fiancé, some asked her to teach her ‘ignorant’ fiancé to know better. Soon the attacks became personal, calling her a ‘gold digger’. One called her a ‘mistress’ that any rich guy in India could ‘buy’.
Why is Kerr, and her ‘character’ a recipient of hate targeted at Spiegel? And where have we seen this before? Actor and producer Anushka Sharma has been similarly trolled for her cricketer beau, Virat Kohli’s performance on the pitch, remember? “It reflects the underlying thought,” says activist Bishakha Datta. “That women are property. To get to him, you use her.” The misogyny also has undercurrents of patriarchal resentment and jealousy — Kerr is a successful and financially independent public personality, in charge of her body and sexuality.
Datta, who is also co-founder of the non-profit Point of View, says the attack is “good old misogyny”. “In the old days, people used to think these things but never said them because there was no platform. Now they do.” The trolls fuel each other, and become even more personal and hurtful. “There is no reasonable discourse left on social media once the trolls take over. They hijack the conversation and make it personal,” says Datta who is currently advancing digital feminism.
Although Kerr herself didn’t make a comment, it wouldn’t be justified even if she had, says Datta. She warns of the larger danger behind such online harassment which borders on abuse.
When women are finding comfort on social media to open up about their experiences with sexual harassment and forming a kind of sisterhood, such trolling is a way to shut her up. Datta recalls British columnist, Laurie Penny’s comment from 2011 who said, “A woman’s opinion is the mini-skirt of the internet.”
Datta explains, “It’s not different from when people justified street harassment by saying she was wearing a mini-skirt. Now, when a woman has an opinion or a voice, they think harassment is justified.”
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