“1 down boys… many more to go”
“If u can't handle the criticism which is obvious... Then don't do shit on the internet…”
“His pronouns are now was/were”
“Let everyone hate you… I’m with everyone”
“Rest in piss brother. You won't be missed”
These are just some of the hate comments on the last reel of make-up artist Pranshu Yadav, which featured them wearing a sari. The comments, along with similar hate comments, were posted after their death by suicide on November 21.
When Pranshu, a 16-year-old queer artist from Ujjain, posted the aforementioned reel on the occasion of Diwali and it went viral, it was bombarded by over 4,000 homophobic hate comments. Pranshu even became the subject of queerphobic bullying for a whole week before their death.
Such comments did not stop even after news of their death broke out – with comments like “Bro died like a girl or a boy??” on a reel breaking the news of the incident receiving over 15k likes.
This tragic turn of events, and everyone’s response to it, only begs the question – are we failing to protect queer children from bullying, harassment, and queerphobia on social media? Where are we going wrong?
Social media unsafe for queer minors?
As this news broke out, many queer people and activists alike pointed to Meta’s inaction against the uptick of queerphobic remarks and bullying that were directed at Pranshu’s posts, especially in the week leading to their death.
Indian queer content creators being trolled and social media platforms not acting on them is not new. Yes We Exist India, an Instagram handle known for its advocacy for LGBTQ+ rights in India, reported that many queer creators have stopped reporting hate comments because Instagram does not delete them.
A joint report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IMAI) and data analytics firm Kantar reveals that over 50 per cent of Indians use the internet, with the count standing at a staggering 759 million active users. The report, published in May 2023, also predicts that this number will grow to 900 million users by 2025.
However, these numbers also pose the challenge of growing cyberbullying, especially of minors. Data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) suggested that there was a 36 per cent increase in cyberbullying cases in India between 2017 and 2018 alone.
However, this leaves queer children most vulnerable to such harassment. A 2023 LGBTQ online safety report by GLAAD, an American non-governmental media monitoring organisation that works towards LGBTQ+ advocacy and acceptance, reveals major social media platforms’ failure to protect queer youth by failing to enforce proper protections against online LGBTQ+ hate.
This only begs the question – why does this happen?
According to Nadika Nadja, a writer and researcher of tech and gender (among other things), social media platforms allow hate and bullying to spread for a simple reason – it is profitable for them.
“The internet today is not the free and open place that it used to be. Users are now essentially in the gardens of others. The people who own the gardens, so to speak, have figured out that constant and targeted bullying on their platforms means increased engagement, which means increased revenue,” she says. She adds that social media platforms turn a blind eye to their own community guidelines violations for this reason.
Due to this, she says, queerphobia makes its way to these platforms. “Words, actions, and behaviour that aim to silence any expression considered as deviant, or punishing anyone going beyond the fixed notions of male and female get rewarded, and this is exactly what happened with the case of Pranshu,” she explains.
Further, she adds that anonymity on social media also emboldens its users to get away with all kinds of terrible behaviour.
Failure of the law?
To make matters worse, the Indian law guarantees no protections against cyberbullying for any social media user – let alone queer minors.
“It’s the Wild Wild West, really,” says a law professor (who requested to have their real name kept anonymous), who is most popularly known by Kaafi Historian (@TurbulentTamizh) o
They explain, “There is no specific act to protect queer minors against cyberbullying in the Information Technology Act, nor in its amendments. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act has some vague anti-harassment provisions, but it is highly unlikely that they would be properly implemented. No section in the Indian Penal Code protects people of marginalised genders against cyberbullying either.”
There is also the issue of the police and law enforcement bodies not taking accounts and complaints of queerphobia seriously. “If a queer person tries to register a police complaint against queerphobic behaviour or harassment, the chances of the complaint being registered are low,” the law professor says.
They also point towards the lack of action taken against anti-LGBTQ+ remarks made by prominent public figures – a more recent example being the remarks made by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta during the “same-sex marriage” hearing in the Supreme Court.
“Generally, queerphobia is not taken seriously at all. This is no different when it happens online either,” they state.
What can social media companies do?
First and foremost, Nadika says, social media content moderators need to be sensitised to queerphobia and trained to recognise it. “In addition to regular training, social media companies must also focus on diversity and inclusion of marginalised communities to ensure sensitised moderation teams.”
The moderation teams must also be made to recognise queerphobic slurs and terms in various vernacular languages. “Social media platforms, so far, can only recognise slurs in the English language. Content moderators who understand the nuances and contexts of Indian languages can recognise queerphobic harassment in those languages too,” Nadika says.
Illustrating the need for linguistic understanding in social media content moderation, Nadika takes the example of the Tamil term ‘potta’, which is used as a slur against trans women or effeminate men. “A moderator who cannot understand the Tamil language would fail to recognise this word or the connotations it carries,” she explains.
It is also important that content moderation is overseen by a team of human beings, and not Artificial Intelligence (AI) models. “AI models, while they do not recognise bigoted language, can be used to identify when there is an uptick in the number of comments, reposts, quotes or shares on a particular post. This can then be flagged off for human moderators to review. If it is found that this activity involves trolling, harassment, or abuse, action can be initiated against the accounts that perpetuate them,” she explains.
For this to happen more effectively, Nadika argues that moderators must have the power to initiate action against potentially harmful content. She reminds, “In the past, we have seen how often the decision-makers of social media companies ignored warnings from moderators about the proliferation of harmful posts, as well as the consequences.”
Further, she says that social media users must also have the right to choose the level of reach and engagement each of their posts gets.
The role of the law
At present, there is no comprehensive law against online bullying, hate, trolling, or bigotry.
“Our current cyber laws are woefully unequipped to deal with cyberbullying,” Nadika says. She adds that there has been a demand for a comprehensive Internet and Data Safety Bill in India, but the government’s priorities seem to be elsewhere.
“The Central Government essentially wants to act against online activity that poses a threat to national security – and the current Digital Data Protection Act and Information Technology Act give it the power to direct social media platforms to remove content that it deems as such,” she says.
There are also no laws that protect gender minorities against acts of harassment and bullying, both offline and online, Kaafi Historian says. However, they warn that a law that prohibits hate speech could also have the potential to be misused, and may have ill implications on people’s free speech as a whole. “While the Supreme Court remarked that hate speech is a reasonable exception, hate speech laws always end up being misused by dominant and oppressor communities to suppress any attacks or criticism against them,” they say.
However, in addition to a legal and a technological framework, Nadika says that a solid social framework to prevent instances of queerphobia on the internet is the need of the hour. “While we boast about Digital India and having the most number of internet users, it is also important to teach Indians how to conduct themselves on the internet,” she says.
Echoing this sentiment, Kaafi Historian says that no law against queerphobia is alone sufficient without efforts to sensitise people against queerphobia.
“Take the SC/ST Act for instance. Any Dalit or Adivasi person would tell you that the act is not very effective, as complaints of casteism are not taken seriously by the police. Similarly, to protect queer people against harassment, we need to take steps to not just introduce laws, but also to enact them and educate the police about them,” they say.
