Unruly Mobs And Internet Trolls

A friend narrated this story about a disaster that befell his friend, who was running a small bakery in a medium sized town in partnership with an upcoming politician in a local party. However, 2 years into the venture, the bakery fell on bad times, and there was tension between the partners because the politician’s terms for separation were as outrageous as they were onerous. After a prolonged court battle, the verdict favored the friend, leaving the politician fuming, and swearing revenge.

A few weeks later, a mob of 10-15 people, carrying the flag of the party to which the bakery’s erstwhile partner belonged, came in a procession along the street where the bakery was located. The mob paused outside the bakery, and the slogans suddenly grew more trenchant. The first stone broke the flimsy plastic name board of the bakery. The 20th stone destroyed the shop completely. Remarkably, none of the other stores on that street suffered any damage.

The police dismissed the complaint against the politician-partner saying it was a political procession indulging in legitimate protest, and in any case, the named accused was not part of that procession. Not for the first time in India, a mob got away by intimidating with large numbers. Last week, scores of shops serving non-vegetarian food simply downed shutters when mobs told them to, because, “There were just too many of them.” Goons attack couples and some have been killed for being together in public.

All such incidents have one thing in common – the perpetrators came as a mob, knowing that if alone, they would be caught and punished. Americans who acted alone in recent attacks on immigrants were immediately arrested, but racist attackers of Africans in Delhi came in mobs.

“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd,” says Bertrand Russell, in Unpopular Essays.

The Supreme Court has now ruled that the members of the mob can be punished for the damages inflicted and crimes perpetuated as a mob. The same Court has defended the right to call bandhs, strikes and hartals as a democratic right to express dissent, and an approved way of protest.

Where are we going with this? As someone said - doesn’t your freedom of expression stop at the tip of my nose? British etiquette bats for a ‘personal space’ that shall remain sacred. If I respect your personal space by letting you stage a noisy protest at a public space, you ought to respect mine by letting me go about my duties in the same public space. Our inability to do this in our physical world has let us tolerate and then suffer monsters in the social networking world.

Every person who is part of a mob loves the anonymity it provides, ditto for the digital troll. What does this say about our society that has so many people who will turn delinquents when nobody is watching them?

When one dog barks, others join in. An African proverb goes: “A dog’s bark is not might, but fright.”

This is but holding a mirror to our society, and showing us up as a conglomerate of highly insecure people. None of the blame can be pinned on the Internet sites, or social network companies. They, the mobs and the trolls, are us.

The poet W. H. Auden wrote, “Evil is unspectacular, and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our table.”

Internet trolls from India have watched and been inspired by the unruly mobs on our streets. We let the mobs run amok on our streets, and so we have ogres doing the same all over the Web. Courts and societal laws are top-down approaches to the problem. How about a bottom-up solution to deal with trolls and mobs? How many unpleasant trolls have you blocked/’unfriended’ lately?

“We who curate our Twitter feeds and Facebook walls understand that at least part of what we're doing publicly, ' like'-ing what we like, is trying to separate ourselves from the herd,” says Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City On Fire.

Ramesh is a Corporate Speaker for Leadership and Strategic Meets. Ramesh’s approach and style are largely to do with interpreting and elaborating the factors that affect organizations, trends in the industry that the organizations need to watch out for and the methods that they can use to achieve their goals. Read his other posts here.