Counting on trolls. See how celebs are playing off their haters
Online trolls used to terrify influencers. Now, hate is hardly a surprise. It’s a sign of engagement, real viewers; a chance to clap back. Take a look
Tom Holland has haters; Julie Andrews too. There are people out there with enough time on their hands to express their dislike of Robin Williams and Chadwick Boseman, even years after they’ve died. Most public opinion about Arpita Khan, Salman Khan’s younger sister who isn’t even in cinema, paints her as unworthy of her brother’s adoration. Check the comments under any of Greta Thunberg’s older posts, it’s teeming with grown men actively spewing hate at a young woman to whom they have no connection. Pran, who played villains in films from the ’60s to the ’90s, was so reviled, his very name dropped out of favour among Hindu families.
He passed away in 2013, and mercifully missed the wave of anonymous online trolls. Content creator Srishti Garg (@SrishtiGargg), on the other hand, faces them every day. On Instagram, some 427K users follow her lighthearted observations about the everyday life. Not all of them are nice. “I get hate about my crooked smile, how I am too cringe,” she says.
Nissi Rufus, a psychologist in Hyderabad, says that high-impact, low-accountability world of the internet emboldens and amplifies even the mildest dislike. “It’s an echo chamber,” she says.
But hate itself is changing. As more lives are lived online, negativity isn’t just normalised, it’s expected, processed, valued and wielded like a badge. Love still trumps hate. But hate’s turning out to be a trump card of its own.
Thumbs down
Aaquib Wani (@AaquibW), who specialises in designing festivals, sets, interiors and interactive installations, worked on Isha Ambani’s 2018 sangeet in Udaipur and Akash Ambani’s 2019 wedding in Mumbai. No one had a problem. Then, in June, he excitedly announced to his 100K Insta and X followers that his studio would design the jersey for the Indian cricket team. All hell broke loose.
“People started commenting about my religion, made fun of the way I looked, of the fact that I was wore a nose pin,” he says. “They posted stuff like, ‘That’s why these jerseys look so bad, they’ve been designed by a Muslim’. It was not nice.” Some users sent him threatening messages, he took his office address off Google, as a precaution. He eventually turned off the comment function altogether.
So, when India won the World Cup in those jerseys in June, Wani’s win seemed all the sweeter. He turned the comments back on, only to announce his next project. It was an elegant clapback at the barrage of disrespect.
Because it’s there
“Visibility breeds criticism,” Wani says. It certainly held true for Prableen Kaur Bhomrah (@PrableenKaurBhomrah) who started creating body and skin positivity content six years ago. Two years in, during Covid, her content started to pick up, and her small community of followers – the safe space to talk about PCOD, stretch marks and acne – was filled with strangers who’d found her on their feeds and weren’t happy about it.
“My skin was fully red; I had acne on my arms, my back, my thighs,” she says. Almost overnight, every post would have 100-150 hate comments. “They’d say, ‘You should die, you look so ugly,’ ‘Look at your skin, how can you show your face to the world?’ ‘You look like this animal, or that animal’,” she says. “People were just unused to someone posting something unfiltered instead of Photoshopped, FaceTuned content.”
She knows that the hate comes simply because she doesn’t fit into the pliant, polite pleasant mould expected of women in the public eye. “For my shopping videos, if I’ve ordered an XL size from a brand and it doesn’t fit, the most common hate comment is that my weight is the problem,” she says. That’s where having a large following helps – she has 975K followers across YouTube and Instagram. So, there’s always a fellow commenter jumping in to school the hater that the issue is not Bhomrah’s size, but the brand’s inability to live up to its labelling.
Rise and fall
Most modern hate is fuelled by the fact that the internet can put ordinary people in the spotlight. “Before social media, when people shot to fame, the public assumed they had the cred to do so,” says comedian Kajol Srinivasan (@LolRakshak). “Now, someone exactly like you, who was nobody four months ago, is suddenly partying with Karan Johar and it’s all over your feed.” The envy and resentment are directed at the easier target. “The viewer asks ‘Why not me?’, not why Karan Johar is partying with someone new.”
It’s happened often enough that even fledgling creators now brace for the hate, even viewing it as a mark of actual engagement – bots auto-click on Like; but only real people do the hating. Garg has found that the venom directed at her is consistent no matter what she posts about. It means that the commenters don’t actually care about her content, so heeding them is pointless. Srinivasan has a different tactic: “I’ve trained my eyes to unfocus when I check notifications, so I can glaze over comments that start with ‘This was the worst…’”.
And everyone realising, sooner or later, that no one can or should process the unrelenting barrage of negativity on their own. Bhomrah went to therapy for a year and a half and never engages with the hateful comments. But she didn’t close her comments section either. And Srinivasan, like anyone who lives largely online, knows that while hate can’t be stemmed, it can certainly be weathered. “That’s the brilliant thing about our new reduced attention spans. Whether people are praising you or abusing you – in four days they move on.”
From HT Brunch, November 02, 2024
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