What it is like to be abused on Twitter
Social media brings out the best in people. And social media brings out the basest in people when it comes to interaction with those unknown to them, otherwise labelled strangers. What is it about the cover of anonymity, or being virtual that endows so many on Facebook and Twitter with the kind of audacity that leaves the civilised ones dumbstruck, at a loss of words to post a suitable response? The idea of a social media interaction to engage, debate, discuss, agree, disagree, deny, repudiate, endorse, promote, negate and mock has convoluted into something that resembles nothing that would be acceptable in any code of conduct. Seldom is seen a disagreement that is presented without the addition of words that are negative in connotation. Rare is an opposing view put forth without humiliating the person the virtual engagement is being done with. Scant is the repudiation of a point of view couched in civil words.
What is wrong with this picture? Indeed it is ugly but then ugliness is relative. This is beyond relativity. It is bad without any ifs and buts.
I see it every day on Twitter being done to some people. I've experienced it in its most unsavoury form after I became a household name in Pakistan and India, last year, in a story I had little control over. Now the attacks on me are very infrequent but the consistency of the names that are used to attack me with remains. The ad hominem attacks have taken a new shape in blatant malice when my inoffensive but critical tweets of - add a political party/leader's name here - are met with nastiness hurled on me based on nothing but some tweets to/about me last year. Imagine the irony: You "know" me through some tweets in which I was tagged, and that gives you the right to throw filth on me? However I can't comment on a media report based on days or weeks of investigative journalism on the political party you follow blindly like those mice in that story of a pied piper, or the political leader you worship like the god/s you fold your hands to?
Why the pretence of being on a social media forum when you refuse to accept the very premise of a social interaction? Nothing is absolute, and that includes all you hold sacred about a political leader or his/her actions or words. The same is applicable to the celebrity you pledge your allegiance to. The social media militant brigades on a mission, with a vow to strike down all negative commentary and disapproval of their demigods' performance with a rancour that would leave Maniae speechless.
Trolling is passé. This is in a league of its own. A side of human behaviour that is so dark, so brazen, so remorseless it needs a special branch of anthropology to decode its composition and raison d'être. Its existence and spread is analogous to that of a biological weapon being unleashed on a hapless crowd in a closed space. As you read of a Kavita Krishnan, a Shruti Seth being put through an indescribable horrific online hell of abuse, you wonder how easy it is for ostensibly harmless people to get to a point where the facade of civility slips easier than the masks in a drunken assembly of revellers in a Halloween rave. I supported the #SelfieWithDaughter initiative, and I thought Krishnan's comment was in bad taste. But that's where it ends. A comment is what it is: a comment. And the only rebuttal is another comment, NOT a barrage of gaalis. Seth's tweets weren't even that provocative to merit any kind of attack, vicious or otherwise. And then it all started.
You see Twitter handles with a senior citizen's picture, a man in his 30s with a receding hairline holding his child's hand, a pretty woman with some inspirational tagline in her bio, a solemn teenager with love for all humanity as his header, a young woman primly claiming to love her country. And then you look at the tweets. The raw venom, the bare malice, the mindless wrath, the naked hatred. Some you ignore. Some you laugh at. Some you shake your head at. Some you don't even want to read. And then a chill appears. Who are these people? Hundreds and thousands of them crawling out of spaces that are dark and putrid. But the realisation that they are not some mutant creatures in a C-grade Hollywood movie but normal regular people who exist around you makes you go cold. It's not even anger that you feel. It's a deep sadness viewing a phenomenon of normal regular decent people turn into banshees, baying for virtual blood of all those who exist in negation of what they hold to be the truth and nothing but the truth.
In real life, off-Twitter, most verbal interactions end without hurling cuss words at one another, the kind of words that were considered the exclusive prerogative of those who were thought of as "immoral" and "moral less." Even in disagreement, most people do not abuse your children, parents, spouses, colour, profession ethnicity, nationality, and faith. Your words are not judged so harshly that your mother is abused in a language that has few parallels in filth. How do normal regular people unleash the vilest side of them when they know they can't be seen? Is morality only skin-deep? Does your code of conduct depend on your visibility? Is your moral compass conditional to being face-to-face, in actual presence of the person you willfully trash in a virtual interaction?
It is evident by the relentless onslaught on all those who speak in disagreement or opposition to the views of the party/leader you follow that certain accounts on Twitter exist simply to silence all such voices. Attack all that the other side says with such ferocity and such consistency that the opposition starts to retreat into a corner of silence. Push them off with so much toxic force they rue the day they chose to speak against what you hold true. Trash them with so much methodical savagery that they say: no more.
And unfortunately some have actually quit social media, Twitter, after being abused and trashed without a pause. But all those who face these armies of filth and stay firm in their views, ideals, and beliefs are the ones who pave the way for a space that exists for all. Coexistence of divergence and diversity and dichotomies is what makes the world the wonderful place it is. And social media the splendid unifying force that it has become. And anyone who has a problem with that… Three words for those: mute, block, report. We are here and we plan to be here. And in this conflict the good will triumph. The filth you hurl will only take you that far… Away from your real self, alienated from a world where there is room for all views to exist. Without @#$%&S*$...