@OfficeOfRG hacked—media rushes to publicise hackers’ drivel

We have become so used to seeing vitriol and dirty tricks on social media platforms, particularly Twitter, that I was not at all surprised to learn that the Twitter account of Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi was hacked on Wednesday evening. And that a string of abusive tweets had then been posted from the handle.

Our expectations from social media platforms to act against hate speech, threatening messages and impersonators have fallen so low in the face of their lackadaisical approach to reports of abuse, that I was also unsurprised to see the slow response time of Twitter to the cyber attack.

It was also normal for troll armies, who thrive under the seemingly benign gaze of Twitter, to revel in the homophobic nature of some of the tweets posted by the hackers. Any Indian political hashtag is dominated by trolls spewing casteist, communal, homophobic, misogynist, racist hate speech. Most Indian politicians—particularly opposition politicians and women politicians across all parties—are at the receiving end. LGBT people on social media, of course, receive frequent abuse of this nature just for existing.

Again, not surprised that some of my colleagues in media gleefully quoted the tweets posted by the hackers, to make fun of the Congress Vice-President. They are entitled to their biases in their personal capacity. But when this extended on Wednesday to celebrating expressions of bigotry, that’s a problem.

Are hackers now guest contributors?

There was one big surprise, though. Many media sites rushed to publish a story on the cyber attack, which in most cases was nothing but stringing together the hackers’ vile, offensive tweets, thus giving the hackers what they yearn for most—the oxygen of publicity.

Scroll.in, India Today, India Times, Huffington Post India, Janata ka Reporter and News Nation were among the first to publish some of the offensive tweets. Most of them coyly inked out only the swear words while publishing the vile tweets, leaving precious little to a reader’s imagination. India Times was the worst offender, not only publishing the tweets in entirety, but headlining the story describing the cyber attack as ‘hilarious’.

The net effect of this kind of unthinking media coverage of the cyber attack on a prominent handle, is that trolls and hackers that these same media often condemn have received huge encouragement for their crimes of online intimidation and harassment. Their worst utterances, till now appearing on their own social media timelines and in the comments section of some media websites, have been elevated to the status of editorial content.

These same stories could have focused on the serious issues of organised, funded online harassment and compromised security of digital accounts and information, without publishing the tweets that were full of vile language. One shudders to think of the impact of such hacking of online accounts of regular people who are not in the public eye.

At a time when we are talking about moving towards a cashless, digital economy, this conversation is of paramount importance. But even worse was the act of omission by most of these stories carrying the tweets published by the hackers, which failed to recognise or comment on their homophobic nature.

India Today’s DailyO blog, however, in a separate post decried the homophobic nature of some of the tweets, and condemned the larger climate of tolerance of homophobia in discourse. In my opinion, they could have made these important points without publicising the homophobic tweets in the same blog post.

Such were the priorities of some in our media, the day after the ruling party BJP’s IT head Amit Malviya issued an open threat to Indian journalists, after the conviction by a Karnataka magistrate of journalist Gauri Lankesh in a defamation case brought by a BJP MP.

To his credit, Scroll.in’s editor Naresh Fernandes moved quickly, once alerted, to ensure the tweets posted by the hackers were deleted from Scroll’s story on the hacking. Scroll also on Wednesday covered Amit Malviya’s threatening tweet to Indian journalists. You can read that story here.

Indian media houses which decry the methods and madness of trolls and hackers, need to reflect on the platform they gave yesterday to extreme hate speech. Stop the hypocrisy and clean up your own act.

As I finished writing this story, news has just come in that the official Twitter account and website of the Congress Party too has been hacked. Will investigating agencies, Cyber Crime cells and police determinedly trace and arrest these hackers? If that doesn’t happen, I won’t claim to be surprised.

Lesley Esteves is Editor, Digital at National Herald and tweets at @LesleyEsteves