Published in EastMojo
on Feb 15
A peek into the psyche of a troll
A survey found out that eight out of 10 people experienced some form of
online harassment in India. Celebrities are often soft targets. Experts say
anonymity is one single factor that makes many interaction ethics go off track
on online platforms
Actor Shah Rukh Khan was trolled endlessly on social media after he went
to singer Lata Mangeshkar’s funeral, over false allegations that he ‘spat’
after offering his respects. He was actually blowing a ‘dua’ as per an Islamic
practice.
People went gaga on social media after a man accused of lynching a
student leader died, after jumping off a police vehicle in a bid to escape in
Assam’s Jorhat. Netizens “saluted” what they called was “instant justice”.
Netizens posted insensitive and nasty comments about actor Salman Khan
after he was bitten by a snake at his farmhouse near Mumbai a couple of months
ago.
Trolling and social media justice seems to have become a norm nowadays
with people venting out for reasons that could range from the bizarre to
obnoxious and even dangerous.
Celebrities, especially, are soft targets with people targeting them
even for their dresses and not thinking twice before posting nasty comments on
social media. Just because it’s an open medium to express, people think that
they can do anything and everything and get away.
So what drives this pattern of behaviour on social media that has become
so common nowadays? And what pleasure do people derive from such a morally
depraved mindset?
Dr Rajesh Sagar, Professor, Department of Psychiatry, AIIMS, says a lot can be explained with the proliferation of technology in
our lives, when especially during the lockdown, people were indoors and heavily
dependent on social media to meet their need for connectedness and
belongingness.
“However, online interaction is always different from in-person
interactions and there lies the difference. On online platforms, anonymity is
one single factor that turns many interaction ethics go off track, such as
expressing judgement and providing negative feedback,” Dr Sagar said.
Explaining further, Dr Sagar said trolls almost know that they may never
personally know the celebrities or may never be able to see the reactions of
such profound words used online on their faces, or the impact of it on their
real lives. And this causes loosening of inhibitions.
“People often tend to express some of the most raw or primitive thoughts
with no further need to engage further in conversation. And these comments, with
a simple click, can always be deleted, which further reinforces expression of
any initial thought.”
Online abuse
In 2017 a study by Norton by Symantec showed that 8 out of 10 people
surveyed experienced some form of online harassment in India. The most common
forms of online harassment were abuse and insults at 63 per cent followed by
malicious gossip and rumours at 59 per cent.
The aim of the study was to understand India’s exposure to online
harassment that ranged from unwanted conflict, trolling, character
assassinations, and cyberbullying to sexual harassment and threats of physical
violence, and the impacts of these experiences.
Incidence of online harassment was high for people under 40s, with 65
per cent reporting online abuse and insults. 87 per cent of people with
disabilities or poor mental health and 77 per cent of those with weight issues
reported abuse or insults online.
Dr Sagar feels there are plenty of cognitive biases at action for such
behaviour. Such as the halo effect, which means letting one impression about a
person or object dominate the evaluation of the whole person. So, if one
celebrity has fought for a significant social cause, people generalise their
impressions and tend to consider all their actions as good. This happens vice-versa
as well.
“Often this bias is fuelled by another bias called confirmatory bias,
which is one tendency to interpret and recall new information in a way that
confirms one’s prior beliefs. Thus, people end up forming a rigid sense of
opinions about them which is often expressed in extreme form of judgements.”
With rumours and fake news circulating on social media like wildfire,
people often get trapped into quick judgements that are emotionally loaded
rather than checking full facts and then forming a more balanced opinion about
someone.
Do such people get sadistic pleasure by celebrating others' pain on
social media? Dr Sagar says, “It’s difficult to say that people exactly enjoy
the pain or derive some sort of sadistic pleasure when a culprit is punished publically
or killed in a police encounter.”
In the Assam incident last November, a mob of at least 50 attacked a
student leader, who later died, and two others after an old man fell off his
scooter and got injured. The mob had suspected them of hitting the man with
their car.
The prime accused died after being reportedly hit by a trailing police
vehicle when he jumped out of the police car to escape. Later, people expressed
their “happiness” on social media at the death of the main accused.
“If people celebrate a criminal getting punished publically, it’s not
right. Even a criminal has the right to defend himself; people should have
trust in the law of our country. I would say they do not think logically and
cannot be called mentally sound completely,” says LN Rao, a former DCP with
Delhi Police and now a criminal lawyer, adding people should never take law in
their hands.
Rao said it is basically people’s nature that when they do not like
someone’s post or their opinion does not match with others, they opt to
trolling them on social media. “Some do it because of jealousy, or do it as a
confrontation to others’ opinions.”
Actor Anushka Sharma was trolled more than once for India’s defeat, just
for being wife of former captain of Indian cricket team Virat Kohli.
TV host Mandira Bedi faced trolls over her attire during her husband's
funeral and also because she was performing his last rites.
Brands have also faced social media backlash because some people did not
like their idea of creativity, forcing them to take back the controversial ads.
A sense of power
To be able to become a part of practice like trolling gives people an
extra sense of power and self-correctness, says Dr Samir Parikh, an eminent
psychiatrist and Director of Department of Mental Health and Behavioural
Sciences, Fortis Healthcare.
“People want very instant gratification for everything. So when it comes
to a solution for somebody’s crime or mistake, they need to have an immediate
solution. To be able to become a part of it gives them an extra sense of power
and self-correctness,” Dr Parikh said.
When Kollywood actor Dhanush announced he ended his 18 years of marriage
with Aishwarya by sharing a note on Twitter, the news spread like wildfire.
While some fans understood and accepted the decision of the duo, others started
trolling the star.
Similar was the reaction when Aamir Khan and Kiran Rao announced their
divorce.
Actor Samantha Ruth Prabhu faced trolls on social media, be it for her
divorce from Naga Chaitanya or her professional choices.
Dr Parikh thinks such people feel a sense of validation and
encouragement that others also think ‘like them’ and they also want their views
to go out there.
All this mostly happens with a sense of anonymity because the individual
feels people wouldn’t know who he is. They let out whatever is their angst, and
what they feel strongly about, in an uncensored way, because they are seeing
lots of other people doing it and so they get reinforced, Dr Parikh said.
“This is how trolling becomes a part of our life, which is very
unfortunate because it can have a very negative impact on people’s lives. We
have views about almost anything and everything — from body image to clothes to
background to education to societal norms.”
So when you see that somebody either on your side of belief is saying
something, you amplify it, or somebody is saying the opposite, you try and run
it down, he said.
Recently, actor Sunny Leone got trolled for not holding daughter Nisha
Kaur Weber’s hand in public, with netizens questioning her motherhood and
accusing her of adopting a girl only for publicity.
Just a few days after Shah Rukh Khan’s son’s release from jail in an
alleged drugs case, a video surfaced on social media of a man resembling Aryan
Khan, peeing inside the Los Angeles International Airport. It turned out that
the man in the photo was a Canadian actor and the incident happened in 2012.
Dr Sanjay Chugh, a Senior Consultant Neuro Psychiatrist, says when people celebrate violence or violent behaviour, which would
even include lynching, it serves as a reminder that we need the veneer of
civilisation that all of us have.
“We are still uncivilised beings who descended from animals. A civilised
veneer arises from the fact that there is a desensitisation to violence. We
would not indulge in violence ourselves but if we see it happening, we tend to
have an opinion. If there is a righteous indignation that this guy has been
rightly punished, this culprit has been punished or is being lynched, that
righteous indignation allows us to give vent to our own baser instinct and that
is why the celebration. There is no merit in this of course,” Dr Chugh says.
Dr Chugh equates trolling with bitching. But why do people bitch?
Firstly it helps them to distract their own minds from their own problems.
“People also bitch because their mind in a very perverse kind of way
tells them that if they can show someone else down, it means that person is now
on a lower pedestal.”
Why it happens
Giving a detailed psychological assessment, Dr Sagar says one of the biggest
factors behind such uncontrolled online behaviour is what he called the
‘infodemic’.
“These days, there are unreliable sources of information that spread
very rapidly. Many of us tend to believe in it immediately. Many people are not
sophisticated social media users, and overly trust content forwarded by their
friends and family members. Though fact check is a great initiative in this
regard, not many people run their mind across multiple perspectives. As a
result, they get socio-politically motivated easily and can indulge easily into
supporting extreme claims and actions.”
Dr Sagar said humans are social animals and there is an inherent need to
be socially accepted by people. And because most social interactions are
online, this need for social acceptance has shifted to people online, whom we
call netizens. “So, acceptance by netizens or fear of being isolated by
netizens is pronounced and so many people tend to follow the mass trends. It’s
like a domino effect where often people start doing what others are doing
merely to fulfil the need for social belongingness.”
One of the biggest issues with this approach, he said, is that the
extremist opinion gets heard most and those having moderate or mild individual
opinion gets sidelined or suppressed. Thus, it’s very common to find online
platforms easily divided into two categories of supporters and haters. “People
are left with limited opinion to belong to one of the groups, which leads to a
kind of online social pressure situation,” Dr Sagar said.
Based on the acceptance needed, it’s almost a trend for people to keep
working on content that gives them the highest views and the most number of
likes. For this simple need to gain more online popularity and increase the
number of their followers (which brings some other perks as well— financial,
publicity, etc), people may create and support sensational content, Dr Sagar
said.
“The advantage of online moral policing is that it helps a person to
feel empowered (by belonging to the ‘just/right’ group) as well as helps in
getting immediate support and encouragement from people online (which is often
difficult to achieve that quickly in real social scenarios),” he said.
The way out
But is there any solution? Dr Parikh feels the society should be zero
tolerant towards such behaviour. And those who are trolled should not bother
about those who do not think about others and are not rational enough.
Dr Sagar said people need psychological skills to regulate themselves.
There is a rising need to make people aware about self-regulation skills on
social media as well with more awareness on the legal consequences of their
cyber behaviour, he said. “Cyber hygiene should be a way forward and must be
endorsed by everyone.”
The writer is an independent journalist and video content creator based in
Delhi-NCR.
