I watched cyber trolls live -- and how little platforms did to stop them

Summary

The incident highlighted how ineffective much of social media's safety and reporting tools are, when you're in the thick of it.

You are never truly prepared for the mental toll that an ugly exchange can extract. When it happens online, propagated largely by faceless screens that appear to have lowered an entire demographic's capacity for empathy, the effect can be exponentially worse.

Over the past week, I bore witness to one such instance of mindless, hostile trolls -- and the trail of damage they left behind. More importantly, though, the incident highlightedhow ineffective much of social media's safety and reporting tools are, when you're in the thick of it.

The modus operandi was remarkably simple. Using a conveniently edited screenshot, a religious narrative was posted online by a clutch of social media accounts which, suspiciously enough, only post about such topics. Each of these accounts had nearly 500,000 followers, and the levels of engagement shot up instantly -- triggered by a commentary that a certain journalist's opinion column in a Delhi daily was religiously biased.

What happened over the next twenty-four hours is not just everyday reality for various journalists today, but is a masterclass that appears to have evolved from what was once a cyberattack tactic called 'distributed denial of service', or DDoS.

In a DDoS attack, anyone with access to powerful computing systems can generate a massive, automated flood of fake traffic targeting a victim, completely overloading their website. As a result, the targeted service -- whether it is a bank, a hospital, a government portal, or anything in between -- is forced offline.

In the golden days of pre-AI cyberspace, DDoS attacks were widely feared because they could easily clog servers, bring critical services to a halt, and disrupt daily life. In many cases, they inflicted real reputational damage -- even if only temporary.

Cyber trolling on today's social media, as it turns out, operates in an alarmingly similar way -- though it is perhaps far worse. Here, it isn't just about spreading a narrative against an individual. It's that users, often minors who feel protected by the anonymity of a smartphone screen, genuinely believe their abuse cannot be traced back to them.

Traceability, however, is never impossible in such cases. While many victims choose to suffer through a troll attack in silence, options do exist for those who want to seek recourse. Unfortunately, though, how a person is traced depends on whether one can persuade law enforcement agencies to act.

But more on that later. What's striking is how these attacks spread rapidly and without discrimination. Within 24 hours, the cyber trolls I observed switched to sending comments, reactions and even direct messages to colleagues and acquaintances of the original victim -- since the latter had blocked and reported the original posts, and taken all possible privacy measures.

Privacy advocates highlight that the safest action is to minimise your online footprint. But for many -- especially journalists -- this may not be possible.

As the trolls spread, the mindless trolling escalated to outright hate speech, as well as violent, abusive threats. As these posts were reported, the actions taken by the platforms -- in this case LinkedIn, Instagram and X -- became increasingly opaque. Tracking user grievance reports on these platforms is far from a clear, streamlined process, and following up to seek actual resolution is just as convoluted.

India's latest amendment to its IT Act, 2000, in February this year, halved the time that platforms have to respond to user grievances to 36 hours. While this was a step in the right direction, and platforms risk being held criminally liable and losing their safe harbour protections for failing to do so, the reality is far more convoluted.

Seeing a case through the full nine yards in India demands a barrage of lawyers, endless compliance reporting meetings with MeitY, and an aggressive push of third-party policy advocacy claiming that social media, on balance, does far more good than harm.

When the cyber-trolling machinery is activated in India, it is done with devastating aggression. Case in point: even in reports of violently abusive posts and messages, complaints remain pending for five days. In the case mentioned above, the cyber police offered no guarantee that they could trace the perpetrators or take steps to protect the victim.

Where response times need to be counted in minutes, legal action drags over days or weeks -- long enough for the initial shock to wear off, leaving victims to question whether seeking justice is even worth the mental toll.

All of this begs a fundamental question: Are India's social media regulations actually designed to protect its citizens? Over the years, platforms have consistently pushed back against tighter rules, citing everything from free speech concerns to the technical impossibility of moderating half a billion users.

In a qualitative analysis, where does the Indian legal framework actually stand when it comes to enforcing real, on-ground accountability?

Having witnessed a live cyber-trolling incident from close quarters, I am convinced that platforms do precious little to actually protect individuals -- even those who are organically verified. For the most part, anyone targeted by such abuse is left relying on an adage that sits far outside tech policy:ignore it, sit it out.

Unfortunately, most choose silence and withdrawal, because when forced to confront an actual ordeal firsthand, existing policies do nowhere near enough to protect them.

UNBOXED | At Tata, a tale of two exits

They are entirely unrelated events, but this week, two key figures close to the Tata Group left the building.

On Monday, my colleague Varun Sood reported that Darius Khambata -- a man handpicked by the late Ratan Tata to serve as a trustee for the conglomerate's two primary philanthropic trusts -- will step down.

Khambata, a senior advocate at the Supreme Court, first joined Tata Trusts in 2014 before stepping down two years later. In November 2023, he returned for a second stint.

More dramatic, however, are the circumstances surrounding his departure: as he stepped aside, he reportedly described Tata Sons Pvt. Ltd.'s now-infamous September board coup and rebellion against Tata Trusts Chairman Noel Tata as "a day that will live in infamy".

Just a day later, Mint's Ayaan Kartik reported that AESC Apollo, the Chinese technology partner for Tata Group's battery manufacturing unit Agratas, is also it. The two companies began collaborating just two years ago, and the fallout signals a souring of relations after multiple missteps, leaving a critical, cutting-edge unit of the Tata Group facing a major setback.

Two vastly different departures, arriving together at a pivotal juncture for India's most storied industrial house.