Battles in 140 characters: In defence of trolls

Cyber supporters of the Communist Party of China and India's BJP are among the most aggressive

You really can pack a lot into 140 characters. A few weeks ago, I received this on Twitter: “Try to stop pedophilia in your religious institutions, Mr Jacob. Industrial level of pedophilia is alien to Ind which u ppl brought to Ind.” And this: “Wow, you are convert, so you are a beneficiary of foreign funds thru missionaries”. Both were responses to a column I wrote, arguing that attacks on dairy farmers who were Muslim and racist violence directed at African students, indefensible in themselves, were hurting the country’s image.

I retweeted both messages so that readers could make up their own minds. These comic characterisations would have surprised my last principal at St Stephen’s College in Delhi. He denied me hostel accommodation when I applied for a master’s degree because, as he wittily put it, my “shadow had never darkened the chapel door” as an undergraduate. (He simply disliked me.) I remained an atheist, and instead returned home to Kolkata for a blissful year, freelancing for Business Standard and The Telegraph.

If columnists can hold forth on matters of questionable relevance, trolls ought to be able to do so, too. The validity of one’s argument is what matters. Most reasonable people would agree, however, that airing prejudices should have limits. It is hard not to be sickened by the threats of violence against women on social media in India, usually by men who tweet from behind a cloak of anonymity. The minority baiting in India and the West on social media is also appalling.

I recently asked an 80-something friend what sort of abuse her articles receive from those quick to label a view they disagree with as “anti-national”. “The most obscene language that you can think of and so up to date that it is clearly coming from NRIs,” she replied. The example she attached involved oral sex; this paper, which admirably moderates online comments, would not print it. Even a casual reader can discern cut-and-paste patterns in the comments by Communist Chinese and hyper-nationalist Indians on the websites of international publications. I am passive to the point of being inactive on social media, yet on occasion as a foreign correspondent in southern China, I was targeted on the website of the newspaper I worked for almost as rudely as I would be in India.

Nearly all political parties have social media teams, but supporters of the Communist Party of China, the Republicans in the US and the Bharatiya Janata Party are more coordinated than most — and more insulting. In September 2015, I was asked by The Economist to write for a special issue of predictions for 2016. I wrote that hobbled by its dynastic leadership, the Congress would face de facto extinction when it lost state election after state election. I do not recall one abusive response on Twitter.

With infinitely greater resources than newspapers, the media giants of the 21st century — Google, Facebook and Twitter — do little to police abusive trolling and hate-mongering via fake news. Facebook continues to preen as democracies burn. Mark Zuckerberg dismissed as “crazy” the criticism that fake news shared on his site influenced the presidential election, despite evidence that the laughable idea that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump was shared extensively. With all their algorithms, it should be easy to detect when something comes from factories in Macedonia spewing pro-Trump misinformation — as Samanth Subramanian detailed in a report for Wired magazine — or from cyber cells in Gurugram or Guangzhou. College kids at Princeton built a fake news detector in a 36-hour hackathon.

But, in the US, Europe and India, this unequal battle is at last being joined. Organisations such as SM Hoax Slayer, which this week showed that a video circulating on WhatsApp of an Islamic State hijacking of a Delhi bus was a hoax, and Boomlive.in, which disproved that the Chinese are now exporting plastic cabbages to India. (Two senior people working for Boomlive are former colleagues.)

Aided by the maturity of the French press, Emmanuel Macron ran a campaign that anticipated the name-calling of his white nationalist opponents. His wife Brigitte, a quarter-century his senior at 64 and his former schoolteacher, quipped to a reporter that her husband had to run in 2017 “because by 2022, his problem will be my face”. When Marine Le Pen made a crack about his marriage in a TV debate, Macron ignored it and continued to pick her lies apart.

I aspire to such poise, but sometimes want to drop my surname when I am called a “Pope lover” after an article on economic policy. The alternatives are problematic. After a lunch interview years ago, a tipsy mayor in northern China suggested I adopt as my name Zhi Lao Hu — “paper tiger” in Mandarin. In an age dominated by lazy WhatsApp forwarding and frenetic trolling, I am not even that. In any case, abandoning my last name might cause more trouble on Twitter. My family had a weakness for grand middle names; my mother’s was Padmini, my Tamil grandmother’s Sanghamitra after King Ashoka’s daughter. My parents admired one of India’s founding fathers so much that mine is… Jawahar. Militant majoritarians patrolling the Net to keep it safe from liberal views will be outraged, so please keep this between us.