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In a new book titled, I Am A Troll, Sadhavi Khosla speaks out on the ugly social media trolling that she was once part of, and how it targets women in particular.
Sadhavi Khosla, a former volunteer of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), recently made an explosive revelation. In a tell-all interview, in a book titled I Am A Troll, authored by Swati Chaturvedi, she speaks about how the party would instruct her to do social media trolling against Indian public figures.
She says that she was asked to criticize journalists, actors and political figures online and put up malicious posts against them. Notable persons on the hit list she says, included Rahul Gandhi, and Bollywood star Aamir Khan. Sadhvi however decided to call it quits when she was ordered to tweet criticisms of journalists such as Rajdeep Sardesai and Barkha Dutt.
“I simply could not follow the directions anymore when I saw rape threats made against female journalists like Barkha Dutt,” she says.
In recent times, the degree of the abuse targeted at notable personalities, especially women, has surely increased. With sexual innuendos, trolls often suffocate women users in cyberspace. In fact, Swati Chaturvedi, the Author of I Am A Troll and a former journalist, has herself been a target. Last year, she filed a police case against an anonymous twitter handle that targeted her and maliciously spread rumours.
The advent of social media has surely opened up various avenues for women. It has given women a place to be vocal, on matters that concern them the most. In a patriarchal society such as ours, which restricts a woman’s movement in public places, this surely is a big phenomenon. She has the freedom in the world of the web to express herself and make her presence felt. However, it seems that patriarchy has trickled down into cyber space as well, in the form of trolls and stalkers.
And the best way to achieve this is to target women. It is easy to harass women with sexually explicit messages, and it can be done anonymously as well. Such sadistic pleasure could be attributed to the insecurity brewing due to the increased visibility of women online. For the troll, the Internet is the only access he has to these women.
The personality of the Internet is changing. A place that was once filled with intelligent discourse and exchange of ideas is today also a space where it is easy to malign anyone with abuse, name-calling, stalking, trolling and shaming. It indeed makes it an ugly place for women, going against the basic freedom that the online world once provided them.
Top image via Pixabay.com
A blogger who writes on society and culture, hoping to bring about positive impact on as many people as possible. Read more posts on www.meotherwise.com. read more...
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UP Boards Topper Prachi Nigam was trolled on social media for her facial hair; our obsession with appearance is harsh on young minds.
Prachi Nigam’s photo has been doing the rounds on social media for the right reasons. Well, scratch that- I wish the above statement were true. This 15-year-old girl should ideally be revelling in her spectacular achievement of scoring a whopping 98.05% and topping her tenth-grade boards. But oddly enough, along with her marks, it’s something else that garners more attention – her facial hair.
While the trolls are driving themselves giddy by mocking this girl who hasn’t even completed her school yet, the ones who are taking her side are going one step ahead – they are sharing her photoshopped pictures, sans the facial hair, looking nothing less than a celebrity with captions saying – “Prachi Nigam, ten years later”.
Doctors have already diagnosed her with PCOD in their comments, based on photographic evidence. While we have names for people shamed for their weight – body shaming, for their skin colour- racism, for their age- age shaming, for being a female- sexism, this category of shaming where one faces criticism for their appearance has no name. With that, it also has zero shame attached to it.
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