When Yash Sharma, 25, and his mother attended the annual pride parade in Delhi in 2022, the photos went viral. Sharma was used to facing hate online, but this time, the trolls targeted his mother too.
“It’s odd and worrying, people like my mother have accepted their queer children, why should they face such harassment?” he said.
A queer-rights activist and founder of Official Humans of Queer, Sharma runs a page on Instagram dedicated to documenting queer stories from across the spectrum. Sharma would notice a pattern of trolling on his page, they were most prominent when a transgender person, specifically transwomen, were featured. He would go on to notice a pattern of trolling and bullying when posts of same sex love were featured too. “When I would post someone from the trans community, there were comments from haters mocking that person's appearance, but when I would post about same sex love, haters would drop comments like: ‘so who wears the pants in the relationship? Who is the man amongst you two? This is common when I post lesbian couples.”
Attempts to report the accounts and comments would go futile.
A 2023 social media safety index by the American LGBTQ advocacy organisation GLAAD found that all five major social media platforms—Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter continue to fail at enforcing the safeguarding of LGBTQ users from online hate speech. This alarming trend continues in India.
This, despite Meta often posing itself as an ally to the LGBTQ community. Two weeks back, Meta posted a video on LinkedIn “to amplify the voices and stories of our Meta employees who are shaping a more inclusive world”. This was their attempt to show diversity in the company on the occasion of Pride Month, which is celebrated by the LGBTQ community across the world every year in June.
Ironically, when it comes to online harassment and bullying that the LGBTQ community faces on social media platforms, there has been little done by Meta or any other tech companies.
On 20th of June, a number of anonymous users on X (formerly Twitter) tweeted about wanting to see a bomb go off at the upcoming Chennai Pride Parade, scheduled for the 30th of June. The tweet, originally in Tamil, fantasised about mass violence, said: “A bomb should explode or some confusion should happen in this parade and the rainbow bastards should shatter into pieces.”
One of the anonymous users, who goes by ‘Cricket Fan’ wrote in his bio: “LGBTQ is an abomination of the society LGBTQ are committing unnaturally grave sexual offences If I compare LGBTQ with poop, poop will feel disrespected.”
Rini, a 26-year-old from Chennai filed two cybercrime complaints against the user mentioned above, and another user who tweeted something similar. Decode has copies of the two complaints which are filed under threats of violence and cyber terrorism. “A bomb threat and violence at the upcoming pride parade is very specific and intentional. Maybe their goal was to deter people from showing up to the pride parade. After seeing the tweets, I immediately tagged pro-LGBTQ politicians from the ruling party and police handles but there was no response. I had no choice but to go ahead with the cybercrime complaint on the national portal.”
Once Rini announced on X they filed a complaint, some of the accounts who posted violent tweets went private. However, the account named ‘Cricket Fan’ responded to them in Tamil: “fold the complaint into four and shove it up in the ass of rainbow motherf***ers.”
Rini has yet to hear from the cybercrime department.
Last November, a 16 year-old queer makeup artist named Pranshu Yadav from Madhya Pradesh died by suicide after receiving hate comments, and cyber bullying targetting them for their feminine expression. Pranshu’s death shook the country, and stirred a conversation about violence against the LGBTQ+ community. Local police authorities even opened an investigation into the case, though there aren’t any updates.
Tracking comments on Pranshu’s Instagram six months after their death, hate comments are still standing – loud and clear. Comments include disparaging remarks on their appearance, mocking their death by suicide, their sexuality and more. In older comments, Pranshu is seen taking down trolls too.
In 2022, 15-year-old Arvey Malhotra died by suicide after facing cyber bullying from his schoolmates for his gender expression. His mother Arti Malhotra now runs a foundation in his name.
In February 2023, Praveen Nath, a transgender bodybuilder from Kerala died by suicide after being cyberbullied in the wake of rumours related to separation from his wife, a transgender woman.
“Queer people know that reporting comments and trolls on social media platforms is a futile exercise,” said Jeet, who is the founder of the queer-advocacy group Yes, We Exist.
In the wake of Pranshu’s death, Jeet invited his followers to share their own stories of facing online harassment, bullying, hate crimes and trolls on Instagram. Over 400 respondents, who allegedly reported the hate speech content to Instagram said the platform failed to take action against hate speech.
To combat trolling and harassment on their Instagram and Twitter pages, Jeet ensured comments are limited to only followers of the page. “This limits our audience reach and engagement but it is a necessary step to guarantee safety of our members and followers,” he added.
In the comments section, trolling is not just limited to explicit threats and derogatory remarks, sometimes trolls have their way of staying under the radar too. “I noticed that I would see GIFs that show bombings, missile firing, guns – violent imagery that indicated large scale exterminations – on our page and on the pages of other queer accounts. How do you make Meta understand that a GIF of a bomb exploding under a post about queer rights is a hate crime?” Jeet also added that sometimes, the trolls would write in a different script to surpass the algorithm.
Currently, cyber bullying and harassment of transgender persons is a violation under IT Rules and the Transgender (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019. “For social media platforms, the legal pressure to take instances of hate crimes against queer people seriously isn’t as strong as the stringent pressure of child abuse content,” said Jeet. Online abuse against queer and transgender persons signals a larger normalisation of violence against the queer community, said Jeet. “It’s the same way religious minorities have been demonised in India, where online abuse was normalised against them and one day, someone actually commits a hate crime against the marginalised community,” they added.
When 27-year-old Aindriya Barua and their friend were attacked for their political art, they did not expect their queer identities to be attacked. “A friend who identifies as transgender publicly supported me and soon after, trolls came rushing to their Instagram profile, took screenshots of their photos and morphed those photos,” they recalled. Based in Tripura, Barua is the creator of Shhor AI, a tool for identifying hate speech in the Indian context aimed to tackle a long standing problem of hate speech and language intersections in India.
“Sometimes, on these troll accounts, there are posts that incite their followers to attack queer people. I tried reporting these pages to the respective platforms, but to no avail,” recalled Barua.
To try this out, Barua started to test Meta’s systems by writing hate speech in English, this was immediately taken down. “But when I tried writing in Hinglish, Hindi or any other Indian language – it remained as it was.” As Barua sees it, the current hate speech detection tools are unable to detect hate speech because of language, lack of context and lack of data to train AI on. “In India, we code mix alot and blend multiple languages while speaking, there also no list of fixed spellings for local slurs that can be used as a reference to filter out.” Giving an example of this, Barua says: “If I have to train my tool in the Bengali language, I need to manually go through and track thousands of hate speech comments in Bengali. This kind of labour is a mammoth task to carry out alone.”
Barua’s tool is not just focused on hate speech towards the queer community, but also communal, caste, religious hatred and political hate speech. “These intersections are necessary to look at, because violence against queer persons doesn’t exist in isolation. There are intersectional layers to the violence they are put through online.”
Recently, artist and activist Priyanka Paul, who goes by @artwhoring on Instagram faced a barrage of hate messages, threats and attacks for their political views, and their Dalit, Christian and queer identity. This is not the first time they’ve faced this kind of trolling by the right-wing troll army.
Barua also points out the lack of cultural, political and historical context platforms have continuously overlooked. For instance, “the word ‘fridge’ or ‘refrigerator’ might sound harmless but it’s a communal slur after the Shraddha Walker murder case,” they added. “It’s the so-called harmless comments that carry the most hate. Trolls think they are being sly when they make a comment about destroying something with a JCB, but the larger implication is towards the use of JCBs to demolish houses of Muslims and Dalits,” they added.
Barua’s platform can be embedded with existing social media platforms, and can monitor content to rule whether or not its hate speech and if the platform would like to issue warnings based on the same. Barua has already attempted this with the Reddit API, where Shhor AI went through subreddits and was able to track, filter and take action against hate speech.
“We have clear rules against hate speech and bullying, and take action on this content when we become aware of it, whether that's through our proactive detection tools or reports from our community. We’re committed to ensuring that Instagram is a positive experience for everyone, particularly teenagers and members of groups that may be vulnerable,” commented a Meta spokesperson to Decode's questions.
Decode also reached out to X with a questionnaire, to which they did not respond at the time of publishing.