This is a long post. It is quasi academic and reflective. It was written because I wanted to make sense of a brush with social media virality and to share some insights with others who might find themselves in networked attention centred for telling stories of their political convictions and encounters.
TL/DR: I went viral and realized that social media virality comes with threats, attacks, and trolling. But it is still an amazing amplifying machine and experiencing digital solidarity and support is still one of the most exciting things for a political stance. Now you can do the long read at your own peril.
I accidentally went viral with something I had written. It was a drawn out dramatic narration of an incident that happened on a flight, where I slapped a man who was inappropriately touching the Young woman sitting between us on a long flight from Hong Kong to Amsterdam. I had originally written it for my Facebook wall – presuming that it will add to the conversation about safety, violence, and the need to make interventions.
Not willing to take the heroic position, I chose to write it in first person present tense, taking the position of the befuddled narrator, using sarcasm and dark humor as tropes to talk about something that made me furious, left me shaken, and contemplative about the use of violence in embodied social practice.
Either because of the humorous tone, or because the anecdote resonated with our #metoo conversations, or maybe because it gave so many people a chance to voice to their continued harassment in public spaces, the post got shared and commented on more than anything I have ever written digitally. Following the friend of a friend phenomenon, a website called The Logical Indian asked me if they could reproduce the post. This is a content curation website that I am familiar with, and within the Indian context, I respect that they are advocating for a rational and liberal debate about many of the aspects of life and love that are often lost in cacophony of polarized debates. Along with them the story showed up as an interview on another platform called The Better India, where the story received more amplification.
The already popular post suddenly exploded on social media with thousands of reads, shares, comments and private messages. I was not prepared for this. I spent the first half an hour after the sudden attention, locking up all my private information and past posts from this public scrutiny. Despite knowing that Facebook is not private, I struggled to secure information that I was not ready to put out for an anonymous public gaze.
And then as the comments started rolling in, I tried to follow two rules that I have learned from public writing – first, I put out a public acknowledgement for the overwhelming number of people who showed support, appreciation, solidarity, and humor at that anecdote. I was equally grateful for the comments on the acerbic humor as well as people celebrating that this became an instance where there was an intervention. Second, I resisted all temptations to respond to the trolls and the haters. I have not followed up on all the comments and the shares but the few prominent ones that came to my attention were quite virulent, abusive, dismissive, and damning. Some of them were about the length of the anecdote, some found the humor inappropriate and jarring, some found my vocabulary alienating, and some questioned my intentions for both the actions on that flight and the narration afterwards. I steered clear from engaging with any of those comments, and in the instance when few people directly wrote to me with some questions, I tried to give some replies.
However, this moment of virality, obviously on the merits of staging an intervention in a case of sexual abuse, brought out some engagements and behaviors which were reminiscent of the larger social media conversations that I have been studying and writing about. And I thought it is a good exercise to summarize some of these tropes to recognise these behaviors and make a small resource of what to expect when talking of gender and violence online.
- Deflection: in all of the loveliness and love and support, there will be people who will find something to attack you on. They will either question your intention, or your motive. They will take offense at your tone, or some throwaway joke that you infused into the telling. They will object to your language, your style, your writing, your tone…they will do any thing to deflect from the message. In this case, people who felt the most threatened because I was calling out behavior that is often silenced, went after me as displaying machismo to impress the woman on behalf of whom I did the slapping, complained about the boring nature of the long anecdote, or in one instance, misread my obvious joke about the cabin crew plundering business class goodies, to spew venom and vitriol. The more I refused to respond to them, the more they stalked different conversation threads to get their word out, often piling on to deflect either the solidarity or support for the post.
- Victim Blaming: I am glad that I kept the woman in the story, as well as the airline personnel anonymous because the number of people who read the anecdote to blame them was astonishing. People called the young woman weak, spineless, cowardly, stupid, attention seeking – the list is long – and questioned why she wouldn’t be able to look after herself. Similarly people blamed the airline crew for not responding to things even when they did not have enough information or were bound by different regulation. When I made the mistake of defending these people, there were demands made of either revealing their identities or of acting like a self appointed guardian who had taken the law in my own hands, while still spewing venom at the people who were the most affected in this story.
- Finger Pointing: this is to be expected but it still took me by surprise. There were people who took objection to a range of things – that I did not change my seat when requested by a stranger without any explanation of why, that I chose to write this merely to glorify myself, that I am trying to get my two minutes of fame by encashing on the pain and suffering of the woman who I stood up for, that I was trying to be a macho man trying to win Favour with the woman, that I was making claims to heroism and blurring the real message of gendered violence. None of these people researched, checked, or even did a google search to see and explore my larger body of work as a feminist and an ally to survivors but filled up comment spaces blaming me of being an attention whore while not say anything about the man who I slapped for abusing this stranger.
- Denial: because I did not choose realism as my form of narration, there were people who denied that this had happened. They came with strange excuses about how high class people in flights would never engage in such behavior, or that no woman would just sit there silently suffering and waiting for somebody to save her. Even as others wrote testimonies of feeling unsafe in travel and public spaces, they ignored it all, and insisted that I was either fake news or fiction, it is evident that they find safety in denying that anything like this happens and made it their one point agenda.
- Hijack – one of the strangest thing in network behavior is that any time something goes viral, there will be people who pile onto it in order to get their own slice of traffic. Not all who share are allies. There will be people who use this opportunity to throw tangents, caption you post with backhanded compliments, clickbait headlines, or potshots at your expense, often garnering hundreds of comments that would either disagree with them or respond to their provocation. On the one hand, these engagements lead to increased attention and hence increased traffic, and on the other they hijack the thread into becoming about something else. In this case, the biggest laugh hijack was about comments on my language that was perceived as elitist, globalist, too fancy or erudite to resonate with an Indian psyche, and comparisons with other Indian figures who have also been objects of gentle ridicule and some vestigial postcolonial pride at speaking English well. There were also comments and advice on how to write better. The best thing with hijacks is to dust them off, because any defensiveness will trigger them into trolling.
- Solidarity : And while all that is happening, the thing that is the most inspiring is the amazing solidarity and support that strangers show online. For every insult, attack, hijack, or denial, there were real hundreds who showed love, affection, support, trust, and solidarity. It is easy to forget them because these messages are often repetitive and the majority and what remains rankling are the ones that are aimed at hurting or provoking. I couldn’t keep up with thanking and engaging with all the people who were responding, sharing, testifying, tagging, defending and doing the thing that posts like these are supposed to do – expand the scope of conversations, and engaging in passing on the message of critical actions and safety, and giving the space for these dialogues to emerge. It is good to remember that positive ripple effect and to be thankful for all these people sharing the message. I am overwhelmed and grateful at this and I wish that along with my day job, I could keep up with the stream of comments, tags, and personal messages. I can’t but I am grateful and joyous, and in the face of the attacks, I remind myself of the power of social media networks to amplify messages and how people will respond to stories that they see worth spreading,
- I write this post, as much a reflection on how theoretical research that I often engage in, played out in a real scenario where I shot into momentary social media virality, as I do to share these learnings for people who might find themselves in similar positions and might prepare themselves for these tropes that play out with mechanical repetition for those who take public positions on political issues in different capacities, and recognising the labour and the effort that goes in encountering networks of attention.