Trolls Who Didn’t Even Spare A Woman Need To Revisit Their Attitude Towards Women
Umran Hussain
Hundreds of videos from Jammu and Kashmir surfaced on internet on the eve of India’s independence day showing various politicians, civil servants and officers from various departments unfurling the national flag and participating in cultural activities on the occasion.
Memer’s who keep on waiting for opportunities to pinpoint a specific mistake can always be seen on prowl to hunt such mistakes which ofcourse is not confined only to the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir but has become a global trend in the present times.
Hundreds of memer’s and roasters tried their luck on various videos but one such video which featured a woman employee, apparently belonging to school education department was shamed brutally by the senseless and irresponsible trolls who seldom go through the community guidlines of various social media platforms.
The woman employee in the video can be seen walking in a disciplined way, the military steps or the parade as we call it, but being an employee of a civil department she was bound to fumble. The parade in which she calls upon her senior, (also a female) to come down the stairs to unfurl the flag was shared multiple times on Facebook and other social media websites, obviously with an intent to shame her without thinking of the consequences of the impact the video is going to have on the female employee and her family.
A woman living in a society that always talks about the rights of women, that always boasts of the amount of respect a woman should be given in the society, suffers at the hands of the same society who without giving it a second thought made her gestures a butt of jokes.
The woman in the video is performing her duties and nobody should have an iota of doubt about that, and she may have received orders from her seniors to do what she does in the video and whatever she did, showcased nothing wrong at all and her parade didn’t send out a bad message which may have had a bad impact on the society. One wonders, why was she trolled and shamed.?
The trolls do understand what hurts the people most, but they simply don’t care. Trolling is defined as deceptive and disruptive online behaviour which typically involves posting inflammatory and malicious comments to deliberately provoke and upset people. Trolling is deliberately designed to upset the person’s family and friends.
Irrespective of your ideology or political leaning, if you are a woman, the response is more likely to be abusive. This is how we define ourselves as a society.
How should social media platforms respond to such activities against women?
Social media platforms should promote transparency in how content is monitored. A transparent policy on how a social media platform identifies, prevents, and removes content that is violent towards women will build women’s trust in the platform. Platforms can customise how it weeds out trolls from amongst its users.
