Trolling in India – Burning Issues – Free PDF Download

• “Troll Patrol India: Exposing Online Abuse Faced by Women Politicians in India”, report released by The Amnesty International India.
• The report analysed more than 114,000 tweets sent to 95 women politicians in the three months during and after last year’s general elections in India.

 Highlights

• The research found that women are targeted with abuse online.
• Indian women politicians face substantially higher abuse on Twitter
• Problematic content was defined as tweets that contain hurtful or hostile content, especially if repeated to an individual on multiple occasions
• While all women are targeted, Muslim women politicians faced 55% more abuse than others.
• Abusive tweets had content that promote violence against or threaten people based on their race, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, religious affiliation, age, disability or other categories.
• They include death threats and rape threats.
• Two online studies showed a clear correlation between people who enjoyed trolling and the Dark Tetrad of Personality Traits such sadism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism.
• As per the Online Disinhibition Effect (Suler, 2004) online trolling stems from the shield of anonymity offered over the internet, powering a YouCan’t-See-Me attitude.
• In July 2018, Priyanka Chaturvedi, the 38 year old National Spokesperson of Congress was threatened with the rape of her 10 year old child by a Twitter handle user.
• This occurred during the ongoing and much publicized case of Sushma Swaraj, India’s Minister of External Affairs. The former Supreme Court Lawyer was bullied and harassed across social media by Right Wing Trolls for issuing an interfaith couple with a passport and transferring the departmental officer who denied them the same. She was put under scrutiny for “appeasing” Muslims.
• Swaraj put out a poll on Twitter asking whether such kind of trolling was deemed acceptable. The poll had over 1 lakh voters, 43% of which backed the trolls on her page.

 Trolls versus Cyber Bullies

• Trolls tend to be more focused on online communities and groups. Their end goal is to bring attention to themselves. Cyber bullies on the other hand, isolate the victim and try to bring them distress.

Steps taken by social media platforms to ensure safety of users

• Instagram rolled out a feature comment filtering tool recently, allowing celebrities to sieve out offensive language and hate speech in their comment section. They can either block out a default list of words deemed by Instagram as offensive or customize their own list that they think to be distasteful.
• Microsoft has created a web form where users can report hateful comments along with an appeal feature
• UK business solutions provider Iris’ Head of Platforms and Distribution, Digby Lewis suggests that since social media is more of a visual experience, platforms should also introduce filtering algorithms that moderate images.
• Snapchat has adopted a facial recognition technology to safeguard against trolls on social media.

Best ways to deal with trolls

• Silence is Golden
• Laugh them away
• Kindness wins

 Laws that can help you fight against online bullies

• Section 507 of IPC – Criminal intimidation by an anonymous communication
• Section 499 of IPC -Defamation
• Section 509 of IPC – Insulting the modesty of a woman
• Section 66 E of Information Technology Act

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