Recently, I stepped on what appeared to be a troll-hive by questioning someone on twitter about his self-proclaimed lack of prejudice, while he trolled a mainstream political party. His response was swift: he retweeted me under instructions to his 47 thousand followers to ‘debate’ with me. Knowing that debate is a misnomer for shouting matches and contempt, thanks to the antics of TRP-grabbing, sensationalist news anchors, I was quick to decline. Swifter was the spike in my notifications as hundreds of his cyber minions — anonymous and acrid — dredged up and distorted 10 years of my digital presence as a politically-inclined 25-year-old, over two days and two nights, goaded on by their handler who twisted idiom into insult. These cyber-harassers could not have gotten away with the hate-speech they used to try to ‘tweet me into submission’, had they not been anonymous. They likened me to a ‘cross-breed [female dog],’ called me a ‘bimbo’ and a ‘brainless woman.’
My work, evolving personal political beliefs and international column to advocate peace in South Asia were meshed into the fantastical allegations that I was working with the opposition, the mafia and intelligence agencies to subvert my government. I might have shrugged it off for the absurd lie it is were it not for the unrelenting barbs by these invisible people and their handler’s claim to fame of being followed by the highest offices in the land. His cyber-minions used this to justify their abuse, while fortifying their lies by retweeting and repackaging them.
Systematic cyber-bullying is being orchestrated by people most of whom live outside our subcontinent. They hide behind their green cards and non-jurisdictional immunities. Research revealed that the very same set-up was simultaneously targeting other influential opinion-shapers who did not support their views and spoke up against militant majoritarianism. Most of those attacked tended to be women who dared to question their hate-speech. Oddly, these accounts are being used to settle scores, as allegations linking young activists to opposition politicians — which would never hold up in court — are bandied around as propaganda to poison public perception.
In our metropolitan cities, we have an impressive police force with a reassuring online presence. When the cyber-stalkers realised I had tagged the police in my responses to their posts, they accelerated their online mobbing. They actually had the gall to make counter-complaints and suggest that I be specially protected as an “endangered liberal and secular species.” The language they used was chilling, given the spillover of online harassment into offline harm in many other cases. Secular academics have been lynched by people who stalked them online. The police immediately acted by following my account, and even phoned me with timely advice that I should visit my local cyber crime department, and I did. The senior inspector at the station informed me that her hands were tied because Twitter does not respond to police communications regarding abusive accounts. Despite operating without durable recourse to social media companies and under laws that have yet to catch up with the manufacturing of hate by specially constituted networks, the police registered my complaint, and gave me emergency numbers to call should the online abuse translate into offline violence. They plaint that our strong laws rightly protecting freedom of speech left them unable to prevent cyber-harassment, in a blatant misuse of these laws, as we do not yet have laws cognisant of the broad spectrum of cyber crime. Abuse can only thrive in silence, which is why I recount this personal incident to the readers. Every second, someone, usually a young woman, is being singled out to be silenced by carefully controlled virtual tyranny.
It is true that strong laws for freedom of speech laws required to protect individuals from the might of corporations, bureaucracies and governments. However, there is a pressing need for a new body of laws to protect dissenters in democracies from being targeted by political groups with access to customised integrated (conventional and social) media, with the capabilities to mine big data, nefariously collected from our millennial lives online.
Off late, mainstream political parties have been recruiting digital volunteers to proliferate their messages and create polarities within society. Their online forms keep track of their names, addresses, cell phone numbers and social media identities. The information is used to demagogically capture trends on twitter meant to act like popular bulletins, using crudely worded catchphrases to wage turf wars with their opponents. Some parties send their volunteers emails as often as twice a week, complete with briefings on their issues, news articles in favour of their position, and pre-fabricated hash-tags to capture country-specific trends on Twitter. Political parties and associations should be held responsible when individuals are harmed by libel and abuse generated by volunteer accounts, which they organise and enable. The police and election commissions should be granted access to crosscheck whether anonymous accounts accused of misanthropic activities claiming to sympathise with these parties or associations are actually conscripted into their cyber lobbies. Cyber-bullying should be censured by in-house disciplinary committees and criminal offences dealt with by the law and justice system.
In fact, as the public square relocates itself online, there is a market developing for online abuse. Let’s say, I was Donald Trump, and online analytics were touting my opponent Hillary Clinton as popular, all I would have to do is hire a social media company with influence over a legion of a few thousand fake or recruited accounts to browbeat her followers until they hesitated to say anything at all, rendering my followers more vocal and, therefore, more influential. Little wonder then that legislators treat cyberspace like outer space, a brave new world beyond the purview of regular law, even as we the laypeople effortlessly e-converse while we e-commerce.
Anonymous accounts are the new guerrilla fighters. They take up cudgels for fringe ideologies that cannot withstand mainstream competition and are likely driven underground by popular rejection. Striking opportunistically in concert with each other, they create the perception that those opposing liberal values and secularism are more numerous and widespread in society than they actually are. Social movement theory explains how subterfuge gives people with weak identities a feeling of belonging. Banding together, behind pseudonyms and assumed avatars, and looking at their ideological adversaries as artificial constructs too, these foot soldiers are easily incited by their political masters into doing things they would not normally do, because the vast majority actually believe that the virtual world is ‘less real’ than their ‘regular’ spatiotemporal interactions.
Twitter, to an extent, aids in the gameification of online interactions. Tweets with higher shock value tend to be retweeted and responded to more frequently, and earn their authors more followers. The little men in their big online cults who reinforce each other’s prejudices and fragile egos find asylum in their tailor-made timelines. Misfits in their mundane lives, they come ‘home’ online to a safe bell jar of a world made in the image of the opinions of only those they idolise and follow.
The growth of social media militia mirrors the decline of political parties’ direct interaction with those they claim to serve, and the widening chasm between the needs of their constituents and the bizarre agendas they push. Many candidates are unable to look the ordinary voter in the eye on their doorsteps, year after year, to ask for donations to subsidise their illusions of grandeur, and the grand ideological transformations and social engineering they claim to be the champions for. The new political class of quibblers must instead use low cost, high-value adding means of advertisement, like social media to amplify their messages, crowd-source their dwindling campaign funds and gerrymander their support.
Politweak reimagines paths to peace in South Asia
The writer is an alumna of Durham University’s Global Security Institute and Warwick University’s PPE Dept. She is a politics and governance professional, integrated media strategist and Gross National Happiness researcher. She can be reached on twitter at @LatoyaFerns