The online world amplifies the social norms of the physical world. Women face aggressive and offensive trolling on the Internet, designed to undermine and discredit them professionally and shame them into silence. A perfect example is the ‘Sulli Deals’ app recently created on GitHub that auctioned Muslim women. The active participation of vocal women, especially from minority communities, is resisted by those who do not wish the social order to be disrupted. This isn’t to say that men are not targeted online, but the attacks faced by both sexes are vastly different. Misinformation/disinformation also targets men and women differently and unsurprisingly so, especially in India where gender disparity among Internet users is high.
Gendering misinformation
Take, for instance, the type of misinformation used against Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi who come from the same socio-economic and political background. Mr. Gandhi is referred to as ‘Pappu’ by his critics. The usual misinformation targeting him questions his intellect. But the same cannot be said for his mother. Whether it’s Hollywood actresses sporting bikinis misidentified as Ms. Gandhi or a morphed photo that shows her sitting on a man’s lap, she is portrayed to be an ‘indecent’ woman to undercut her politics. Ms. Gandhi’s position of power does not shield her from vulgar misinformation.
A report by Amnesty International last year said that 95 female politicians out of 724 received nearly one million hateful mentions on Twitter between March and May, one in five of which was sexist or misogynistic.
But misinformation like other forms of abuse has inter-sectional challenges. While actor Swara Bhaskar receives some of the most sexist troll attacks, activist Safoora Zargar is targeted for being a woman as well as a Muslim. After her arrest for participating in protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, pornographic videos were shared in Ms. Zargar’s name on social media. Organised disinformation and sexism intersect with Islamophobia, castetism, religious bigotry and other forms of discrimination to threaten vocal women from minority communities.
The harassment is so rampant that more often than not, women are asked to either ignore the abusers or block such handles. As always, women are expected to take precautionary measures instead of men being asked to behave. We also seldom question Twitter on its failure to stop the spread of pornographic content. The women of Shaheen Bagh were targeted in a similar fashion. Surely a social media giant has the ability to detect and purge nudity, especially when shared with hateful captions?
Gendering misinformation should be a part of the feminist discourse. The world has drastically changed after the advent of the Internet and the digital space has the power to impact democracies. But women do not get an equal opportunity to make themselves heard because they are shut down with sexism or, worse, the threat of sexual violence. Former Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union leader Shehla Rashid was forced to delete her Facebook account after receiving rape threats for speaking in favour of interfaith marriage. Journalist Rana Ayyub has also complained several times of rape threats making their way into her Twitter messages. A report that I wrote in 2018 revealed how thousands of men on a closed Facebook group, ‘Sharing is Caring’, sold Instagram and Facebook pages featuring young women. Many of these metamorphosed into political pages after gaining a substantial following. I was targeted with sexist attacks after the workings of the group were made public. Its members shared my pictures while commenting ‘sharing is caring’, a sexist pun on the group’s name.
But while on the one hand women are targeted with sexist attacks, on the other, their sexuality is used to further misinformation. Some men hide behind female pseudonyms to get attention. Last year, the Chhattisgarh Police arrested a 31-year-old man for running multiple fake Facebook accounts posing as a woman and “posting provocative comments that could hurt social harmony”.
Men are at the centre of the disinformation ecosystem in India — an ecosystem created by them and for them. While women also share false news, the number of men disseminating misinformation is higher for the simple reason that they are greater in number on the Internet (almost double the female population). Men manufacture false news and also fall for such news. They are proof that ‘women gossip more’ is a gender stereotype. Even if we look at this phenomenon from a greater perspective, there are more men in politics and they rely on disinformation to keep propaganda alive. A recent report by UNESCO on online harassment faced by women journalists says that political actors instigate and fuel online violence campaigns against women journalists. India is privy to such abuse — women journalists and activists are targeted not only by troll armies but also by office-bearers of political parties.
One of the most recent incidents that exposes gendered disinformation in India is the Rhea Chakraborty saga. Actor Sushant Singh Rajput was hailed as a self-made man without faults but Ms. Chakraborty was trashed on television and on social media — both spaces dominated by men — as a ‘gold-digging seductress’. The whole episode was a reminder of deep-rooted internalised misogyny in the country. Women also participated in propagating Ms. Chakraborty as the ‘culprit’ and rejoiced when she was arrested. Why did they not show solidarity? Because patriarchal norms, while subordinating women, also give them the power to oppress women more vulnerable than them.
A symbiotic relationship
Misinformation and sexism have a symbiotic relationship. Misinformation piggybacks on sexism to discredit vocal women and sexism uses misinformation to reinforce patriarchal norms. While organised misinformation and trolling affect women on a personal level, the issue that is often ignored is the effect they have on democracy. A healthy democracy is participatory and promotes gender inclusiveness. Sexism and misinformation intimidate women from taking vocal stands and are antithetical to a progressive society.
Historically, feminist movements have led to democratisation. Women empowerment cannot be separated from a modern society. Savitribai Phule could reform modern education in the 1800s because her husband Jotirao Phule, a ‘Shudra’ himself, equipped her with knowledge restricted for the Brahmin community. Jotirao was also fortunate to receive education in the first place because of the foresight of his widowed aunt. Menaka Guruswamy and Arundhati Katju, the only openly gay women lawyers in India, reformed the LGBTQ movement in the country by winning the landmark case in 2018 that decriminalised gay sex. These women went against the social norms of their time to make India more democratically sound. There is no extent to the reforms that women are capable of bringing and progress can happen faster with solidarity. But women who don’t conform to social norms are almost never supported and the intersection of sexism and misinformation justifies their abuse. While social media gives a platform for women to raise issues, repeated abuse takes away that freedom. Social media, the place that bolstered the #MeToo movement, is the same place used to shut women down.
Pooja Chaudhuri is Senior Editor at Alt News
