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India Needs a Fresh Strategy to Tackle Online Extreme Speech

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India Needs a Fresh Strategy to Tackle Online Extreme Speech ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 India Needs a Fresh Strategy to Tackle Online Extreme Speech SAHANA UDUPA Sahana Udupa ([email protected]) is at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and is the Principal Investigator ERC Project ONLINERPOL. Vol. 54, Issue No. 4, 26 Jan, 2019 I am grateful to Matti Pohjonen for network graphs, and Neelabh Gupta for fieldwork assistance in Delhi. Abuse and disinformation should be approached as an important culture of mediatised politics in the digital age, which not only reflects extant political differences but significantly shapes what it means to participate in public life for a net fed generation. Allegations and counter-allegations around abusive speech and disinformation on social media networks have made “trolling” and “fake news” significant actors in public discourse, as India braces up for the next round of national elections. From serious allegations around paid trolls to casual-jocular naming of an irritating user as a troll, brazen language, “fact-filled” untruths and belligerent tone of exchange have become an everyday reality of online political debates. With several prominent online users coming out in the open to complain about abusive speech, online harassment is no longer a private injury that is dealt with in a hush-hush manner—with the nervous, invisible clicks of delete and block buttons. With several new civil society and business initiatives launched to do fact-checking, the quality of information exchange has at the same time become a major concern. Online abuse and disinformation have struck the public mainstream, bringing the spotlight on the “dark side” of internet exchange. ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 While global concerns over fake news and disinformation have found resonance in the world’s second largest online sphere (with 450 million internet users), social media exchange in India should also be understood in relation to longer cultures of political exchange and structures of privilege that define who gets to spread disinformation or abuse fellow users, and with what consequences. Far from dismissing rugged exchanges on online media as political mud-slinging common to India’s fissured democratic landscape, it would serve well to approach abuse and disinformation as an important culture of mediatised politics in the digital age, which not only reflects extant political differences but significantly shapes what it means to participate in public life for a net fed generation. “Extreme speech” is a conceptual tool that could help to grasp the phenomenon of online abusive exchange and disinformation. Extreme speech refers to speech acts that stretch the boundaries of acceptable speech along the twin axes of civility/incivility and truth/falsity. As a concept, “extreme speech” resists the temptation to label all manner of vitriol as “hate speech”. While regulatory excess that could arise out of such overreach is obvious, what is equally important, from a theoretical point of view, is the ambiguity of public speech forms. Mazzarella and Kaur (2009) capture this as “cultural regulation.” Rather than a field of polar opposites, cultural regulation defines a “spectrum of public cultural interventions” between censorship and publicity that feed on each other to “generate value (commercial or symbolic) out of a delicate balancing of incitement and containment.” As regards online speech, this explains the contradictory climate of indulging in online vitriol and its public disavowal, which is itself reflective of the broader tension between containment as a value in the regulatory domain and incitement as an attribute of practical politics. In other words, no political party or vested group will be untouched by the culture of online vitriol and disinformation in the days to come. From an analytical perspective, extreme speech allows us to pry open the field to map different forms, formats and actors involved in online vitriol and disinformation. A departure from the overarching category of “hate speech” allows for closer attention to actual user practices and different new media affordances that enable such action. For instance, I have argued that online abuse in India could be best captured as “gaali” which signals the blurred boundaries between comedy, insult, shame and abuse emerging on online media with divergent consequences (Udupa 2017). Such grounded analysis approaches online abuse as “extreme speech” representing a spectrum of online practices rather than the culturally flat antonymous conception of uncivil speech versus acceptable speech (Pohjonen and Udupa 2017). The key differentiator is that there is a performative moment to transgress the norm, and incentives found in online media and political ecosystem to say the unsayable, make jibes where none was permitted, or creatively mash up messages to offer a distorted view. In all these moments, the “mainstream” or the “norm” are themselves moved and readjusted. While such acts can have a subversive potential to “talk back to authorities,” they can also ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 be a tool for dominance when used from positions of privilege. How do we use these perspectives to map online extreme speech in India, which is gaining momentum with upcoming national elections as a critical event? The brief analysis that follows is based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork among politically active online users in Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru that started in 2013, and social media content and network analysis of online exchange based on purposive sampling. Methodologically, it is rooted in “internet related ethnography” combining onground fieldwork with discourse and network analysis of social media exchange (Pink et al 2016). Form, Formats and Types In our ongoing research on digital politics, we have found that extreme speech is proliferating across social media platforms. Far from an ahistorical position that would consider these forms as a new media phenomenon, such expressions should be understood in relation to cultures of political sloganeering, subversive speech, and efforts to “semiotically dominate the opposition” via oratory (Bate 2009) and campaignstyle manoeuvring in postcolonial India. This history is beyond the scope of this short essay, but suffice it to say that online media have brought these styles to the fore of everyday political engagement, infusing them with globally resonant online user cultures. Online extreme speech reflects and transforms face-to-face interactions set within polymedia environments where television channels and a section of print media are increasingly embracing accessible and provocative language. Although extreme speech expressions are seen across social networking and messaging services, it is possible to differentiate between platform-specific and platform-agnostic formats of extreme speech. Memes: Internet memes, for instance, cut through different social media platforms, as they are shared on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp, depending on the popularity of specific platforms within specific communities. In ethnographic interviews, we have found vast variation in the use of these platforms for political discussions. While online actors more comfortable in regional languages preferred Facebook and WhatsApp to Twitter, urban users fluent in English found Twitter to be a “serious forum” for engaged political commentators. In “assigning political moralities” to social media platforms (Miller 2011), user groups differed in their preferences, reflecting linguistic differences and class location. At the same time, political parties have started to nurture all these platforms, allowing different platforms to resonate with different target groups. Internet memes available across these platforms are images filled with wit and sarcasm, where “political, social and playful purposes exist simultaneously” (Miller 2011: 70-73). Its “extreme” nature lies in the wilful and playful disregard for sanctioned forms of political discourse or polite (elite) ways of political messaging. Labels: The second form of online extreme speech is in the labels assigned to online ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 accounts, pages and profiles. These labels range from soft-touch sarcasm to aggressive derision of the opposition. Facebook groups such as The Illogical Indian @illogicaldesi (64,207 followers)[1], The Frustrated Indian (1.1 million followers)[2], India Against Presstitutes (455,107 followers)[3] and Twitter handles such as Eminent Intellectual, @padhalikha, @UnSubtleDesi and @Sussuswami are some example. Hashtags: The third variety consists of hashtags, where extremeness is in the label but also more fundamentally in the coinage of the hashtag itself. Hashtags are not just about framing prevailing issues, but they actively bring them into existence. In many cases, they instigate the discourse. Some of the most pertinent examples for extreme speech are available in the analysis of hashtags on Twitter and Facebook. One example is the hashtag “gharwapsi” that started to trend in 2015, tagging on to the Hindutva campaign to draw Muslims and Christians “back to the Hindu community.” Reflecting the campaign on the ground, the hashtag provoked voluminous discussions on Twitter around a seemingly pithy expression. Another example is the heated public debate around Jawaharlal Nehru University campus in 2016, after allegations of anti-national slogans stirred a nationwide debate. Hashtags such as #ShutDownJNU and #CleanUpJNU fired up discussions online, in as much as they fed heated clashes on the campus.
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