8.5million tweets directed at Rana Ayyub in 27 months marked her out as one of the most brutally targeted journalists in the world

An interview of Julie Posetti, the deputy Vice President of ICFJ with journalist Betwa Sharma of news website, Article 14.

In India when a state does not incarcerate a journalist over a tweet, it enables a toxic ecosystem to assault the dignity of women journalists, slut shame them and threaten them with abuses that are meant to silence and intimidate them. This interview with Julie Posetti by Betwa Sharma, first published in Article 14 this week, is a deep dive into the weaponizing of Social media to strip journalists of their dignity and their voice. Not a day goes by when I open my Social Media pages and am forced to just shut it down, the visceral hatred against me reflects in the most graphic rape and death threats extended to me and my family including my five year old nephew whose image was recently photo shopped with Osama Bin Laden. As somebody who finds herself trending on twitter almost every week, with the most abusive hate speech and calls for my arrest, my address and phone number shared on social media, burnt copies of my book Gujarat Files sent to my residence, online violence against me and many other journalists has often crossed the thin line of offline repercussions. Let us not forget the murder of journalist Gauri lankesh who was shot dead outside her house in Bangalore in 2017. Days before her murder, Gauri and I spoke on the phone where she asked me to not be intimidated by ‘paper tigers’ online. Days later she was brutally silenced outside her residence. Gauri had translated my book, Gujarat Files into Kannada and we where working to launch the Kannada version of the book in Karnataka. But fate had other plans. Gauri Lankesh in India, Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta, Jamal Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia where victims of online violence before they where murdered. This interview sheds critical light on a problem we can no longer ignore. Read the interview below and while you are here, please consider subscribing to keep our journalism afloat.

In a piece published recently by the Guardian, Julie Posetti and Kalina Bontcheva wrote that the 8.5m tweets directed at journalist Rana Ayyub in 27 months marked her out as one of the most brutally targeted journalists in the world and exposed Twitter’s failure to address online violence. 

Ayyub, an independent journalist, Washington Post columnist, and a critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, has used her social media heft and the global attention she receives to highlight the plight of Indian Muslims and the arrests of journalists in India. She is accused of money laundering and tax fraud related to her crowdfunding campaign to help those affected by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.  Ayyub has denied any wrongdoing, calling the allegations “baseless.”

The tweets were examined as part of an international research project aimed at developing an early warning system for gender-based online violence against women journalists, in light of the mounting concerns of online abuse and harassment leading to offline attacks, wrote Posetti, deputy vice president and the global director of research at the Washington DC-based International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), and Bontcheva, a professor at the University of Sheffield in the UK.

In an interview with Article 14, Posetti delved into why they picked Ayyub for the study, the nature of coordinated attacks, how online violence enables political repression, and why the tech companies needed to fight the abuse levelled at women journalists in many countries, as well as the state-issued orders of censorship on its platform. 

On 26 June 2022, complying with an Indian government order, Twitter withheld Ayyub’s tweet from 9 April 2021 on the Gyanvapi mosque after a local judge allowed an Archeological Survey of India (ASI) survey of the religious site in Varanasi. That same day, Alt-News co-founder Mohammed Zubair tweeted that Twitter had withheld his tweet from 22 February on a right-wing Hindu leader. The next day, Zubair was booked for outraging religious sentiments and arrested by the Delhi Police for a tweet from 2018 with a photo from a Hindi comedy film. In the subsequent weeks, Zubair was booked in six other cases in Uttar Pradesh. 

On Twitter moving the Karnataka High Court to challenge the Indian government’s orders to take down content, Possetti said it was a good move. Still, social media platforms had to take responsibility for what was happening on their platforms, prioritising people and fundamental rights over profit and engagement. 

“What I found dichotomous is that you can have an individual journalist like Rana Ayyub threatened with rape, murder and all sorts of violations on a daily basis and this isn't acted against but what is acted against is a series of what appear to be innocuous tweets and those the state seeks to repress,” she said. 

What made you think of Rana Ayyub as your subject?

I've been following and researching and reporting on Rana’s case for several years now, in fact since I think about 2017, which is when I first became aware of her situation. Based on our international research, it is very much an emblematic case within India but also internationally. The idea for our studies so far—for these novel big data case studies—is to identify not necessarily high profile but examples of women journalists who are prolifically targeted so that we can study and therefore better understand the nature of the abuse in real-time and also to then make recommendations about how better to address and respond to those challenges. Rana’s situation marks her out as one of the most prolifically abused women journalists in the world. She was therefore one of the five women who we have studied for this report—a series of reports—that we have produced on commission from the UK government. 

Rana Ayyub has been called a divisive figure, with scores of people who support her and those who don’t agree with her point of view. In picking Rana, do you politicise what is also an academic study? 

I don't think so. Journalists are by their nature inclined to be accused of being divisive because they report critically on issues connecting to power. It is therefore impossible to avoid politics when analysing or selecting targets when you study journalists. I am a  journalist myself and have been an academic for a long time as well. We are not studying politics per se, we are studying the methods and forms of attack on a journalist and on a series of journalists all of whom have been framed as divisive and in some cases accused of being criminals. Rana is not alone in that. Among the women we study, Maria Ressa is another one in the Philippines. They are targeted because of what they say and what they report but it is not our job to determine whether or not what they say is divisive or not. It is our job to assess the kinds of attacks that they attract. I think it is deeply problematic to suggest that what they say is in part responsible for the abuse and the online violence they experience. It’s a form of victim blaming. 

You write that the abuse and harassment women experience on social media platforms is online violence. What is online violence?

In the same way that with domestic violence—as definitions have evolved over the past two or three decades—we know that domestic violence doesn't include just physical assault, it includes economic violence, which is the ways in which women are exposed to poverty through abuse by their partners, whether that is restricting access to the financial resource or being prevented from earning income. We also see psychological violence referred to with reference to domestic violence. And we now refer to digital violence in domestic violence cases.

We chose the term online violence because online harassment and abuse are the terms that are frequently used to describe what happens on social media platforms and other digital devices and areas of online communication. And violence is used very deliberately because violence is not just kinetic, physical violence.

Violence takes all these other forms. In the case of journalists, the effect on these journalists includes very serious psychological injury in some cases. It also escalates the risk of physical violence. We have various cases of women journalists who have been abused, attacked and harassed online, experiencing offline harm they attribute to the climate of abuse they experience online. 

It also means a variety of manifestations, so online violence includes threats of physical violence whether it is rape threats, threats of sexual violence in other forms, threats of physical violence including murder, threats of harm against immediate family members particularly children, which is a phenomenon we have tracked. Additionally, it also includes digital security attacks. We see women journalists frequently being doxxed, as a way of escalating the risks they face offline, to increase their exposure to physical risk, and we see these things happening with impunity. They are very much in parallel with the traditional threats that journalists experience in a physical context. 

You write that there is a symbiotic relationship between online violence and political repression. (The former chills press freedom, and creates a more permissive environment for the latter.) Do you see this as the future, the immediate future?

We certainly see it happening now. We saw it in (Daphne) Caruana Galizia’s case and evidence that has been accepted by the public inquiry in Malta for murder. We see it in Maria Ressa’s case where there was first an attempt to seed public hatred and public acceptance of her persecution and prosecution which became an eventuality and ultimately her conviction. And we certainly see it in Rana’s case too. A lot of the online violence that she experiences has elements of the organisation about them with the same kinds of threats used against her that we see in Maria Ressa’s case—constantly accusing her of being a criminal although there are no charges pending against her at this point. Those are the sorts of manifestations, hashtags like #arrestranaayyub, which also occurred in Maria Ressa’s case and others as well. This use of online platforms to call for offline persecution is all designed ultimately to chill those journalists’ speech,  but also curtail their critical reporting. 

What are the legal efforts to arrest this abuse? 

There are moves to legislate, to incorporate, sex and gender-based hate speech in hate speech laws for example in various countries, particularly in Europe. Those efforts are designed to ensure that women who might not be able to claim protection under existing laws towards discrimination, whether that be race-based discrimination or religious-based discrimination, can also claim protection under the laws on the basis of threats and abuse experienced due to their sex or their gender. I think that's an important development but we also see legal and regulatory responses to the ways in which the platforms have failed to address these problems in an effective way or have chosen to abrogate the responsibilities they have under U.N. principles. 

One of the key issues is that the dominant platforms are still US-based tech companies. There is a really important role for US regulators to play in ensuring accountability from the platforms and that accountability needs to be addressed in a way that allows protections globally.

If someone is being abused in Hindi or in Tagalog in the Philippines, or whatever the situation might be, is able to get support and redress from the platforms knowing they have the capacity to respond to abuse in those languages as well. To date, there has been a dominant kind of approach that has focused on the English language which is to the detriment of other women around the world who are abused in multiple different languages on a daily basis. Those issues are important in terms of social justice. 

And all of this has to be done with a view to trying to prevent broader threats to freedoms of expression. We, unfortunately, see states and governments use such protective laws against journalists, for example. We've seen that with fake news laws, which involve laws that are theoretically there too —in inverted commas—protect people from disinformation—but ultimately are used against journalists perhaps for reporting critically on pandemic responses, for example. It is a complex area but we are seeing a range of different responses which need to be taken seriously and treated with urgency. 

You write that the harassment Ayyub receives is an intersection of misogyny, anti-press sentiment and religious bigotry. Why those three things? 

She is a woman, she is a journalist and she is identifiably Muslim and that is borne out in the data. We see her being threatened with rape and violated in sexual ways which are misogynistic and hateful, we see her being abused because she is a Muslim and falsely accused of being a jihadi, and subjected to all manner of other abuse based on the assumption that her faith makes her a traitor to India. We see much anti-press sentiment which is a global phenomenon where journalists, in particular, are targeted and abused, partly due to a politically generated loathing of journalists often triggered by political actors who would prefer not to be held to account by critical independent journalists. That is everybody from (Donald) Trump to (Jair) Bolsonaro to evidence that we see in the Indian context of supporters of prime minister Modi. 

Are women in other countries targeted because of their identity? 

Absolutely. In all of the case studies that we have done so far, we see what is referred to as intersectional identity, where the woman journalist is also a target  of  discriminatory attacks —whether it is her faith, whether it is her race, her ethnicity—those factors tend to increase the risk of exposure to online violence and make not just make the impacts worse but deliver some of the worst instances of online violence. We see it with Ghada Oueiss who is a journalist with Al Jazeera who is based in Qatar and is Lebanese and she is a Christian working in a Muslim-dominated part of the world. She is frequently targeted not just because of her sex but because of her Christian faith and the fact that she is living a lifestyle that is condemned by some in that region as being permissive. because she dares to have a social life and do all things that women do all over the world on a daily basis in their public lives and their private lives.

Maria Ressa is also targeted because of her skin condition. So, you see, disabilities come into play as well. She has a skin condition and that is usually mocked and she is called a whole range of things including using terms for male genitalia, comparing scrotum skin to her face.

There is horrible, just horrible, dehumanising intersectional abuse levelled at women journalists all around the world, so much more vile than the abuse we see hurled at men. 

You point out the speed at which abuses are hurled at Rana Ayyub after she posts. What does the speed tell us and what is a coordinated attack? 

The speed at which abuse is hurled at Rana is highly unusual. It comes at her thicker and faster than any of the other cases we studied. We know from other research that when you see abuse coming at such speed and with such intensity—within seconds every time she tweets—such rapid-fire abuse can be a pointer towards coordinated attacks. By orchestrated or coordinated abuse we mean it could be centrally coordinated, or deliberately coordinated. We have seen various instances of state-linked and dark PR firm-led attacks on journalists internationally. I’m not saying that's the case in Rana’s situation. We are still processing the data with regard to that. But we can see patterns that are associated with orchestration. In other words, to see so many tweets that threaten and abuse, at such a rapid-fire pace is highly unusual. And the fact that we are using systems of analysis that are incredibly conservative so we know we are missing a whole lot of abuse. But the computer scientists that we work with use an academic level standard to try to ensure that the abuse they are identifying is indeed obvious, very clear abuse. What that says is that this is a conservative estimate of the abuse and the speed at which it arrives rather than an overstatement by any stretch.

There are various forms of coordination. There is what I mentioned before—the kind of very deliberate orchestrated coordination. We also see pile-ons that are more organic. They can be triggered by a misogynistic group.  For example, we see this with women journalists in the US where there is a behind-the-scenes attempt to inflame and escalate a pile-on that is in itself a form of orchestration.

You have studied over 8.5 million tweets targeting Rana Ayyub. What are the resources and timeline for a project like this? 

We began collecting tweets directed at Rana in December 2019, and we work with a team of academic computer scientists at the University of Sheffield, who have data scientists as part of their team. The computational analysis is done by them and that's machine learning assisted. These are massive data sets so we are not manually extracting tweets and examining them in isolation. We are pouring these tweets through an automatic system that is examining the content of those tweets for the kind of linguistic markers for abuse that have been identified through successive studies including some common Hindi terms of abuse that have been identified by Hindi-speaking research scientists in Rana’s case. The computer scientists are using machine-learning assistants to apply what is called natural language processing, which is an automated way to analyse the text with large data sets and then we are able to dig in and further analyse in isolation the subsets of that data. It is incredibly labour intensive and expensive and involves a hell of a lot of skill and then we match that with the kind of qualitative and contextual research that we do in the research team at the international centre for journalism which is more like I suppose in journalistic terms high-end investigative reporting than it is a machine learning based computer science natural language processing. But we then blend those techniques—the qualitative and quantitative—to be able to tell the story that is associated with the data. 

This exhaustive interview continues further. To read the full interview, Please check the website of Article 14 or click on the link here

https://article-14.com/post/what-8-5-million-tweets-targeting-rana-ayyub-tell-us-about-online-violence-the-failure-to-stop-it-62d104dd20f4b