The clear objective of online violence targeted against Indian journalist Rana Ayyub “is to silence her and the more she is attacked, the harder she fights back,” said a report published by the New York-based International Centre for Journalists (ICFJ). The report titled “Rana Ayyub: Targeted online violence at the intersection of misogyny and Islamophobia” is a big data case study that examines the prolific campaign of online violence directed at Rana Ayyub, especially on Twitter. The report analysed nearly 13 million tweets that targeted Rana between December 2019 and March 2022.
Though Rana has faced severe harassment on Facebook and Instagram, the online violence she experiences is largely through Twitter, where she has over 1.5 million followers, the report said. The researchers used Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to examine tweets directed at Rana Ayyub. From a dataset of 8.7 million tweets directed at her, they identified a subset of 44,467 ‘clearly abusive’ tweets in English and ‘Hinglish’ and isolated that data for detailed analysis.
The report found that 62.05% of the online abuse against her were personal attacks that were also sexist, misogynistic, sexually explicit and racist in nature. Other general insults aimed at Ayyub (34.54% of the total abuse encountered) were identified as credibility-related (attacks on professional reputation). She also faced belief-based abuse (3.15%) which was connected to her religion and politics. The automated process missed at least 50% of the abuse targeting Ayyub because the tools, tuned for high accuracy, mainly identify those messages which are explicitly abusive and where the target of the abuse is clear.
Types of abuses targeted at journalist Rana Ayyub on Twitter
Giving a timeline of online violence against Rana, spanning thirteen years from 2010 till 2023, the report said there were three major abuse spikes in the analysed dataset. All the three spikes are associated with her reporting and commentary in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. The first one was in January 2020 with the Washington Post publishing Rana Ayyub’s opinion piece condemning Prime Minister Modi amidst the debate around the Citizenship Amendment Act. The second one was in March 2020, when Rana Ayyub tweeted a critical comment about India’s management of the COVID-19 crisis and again when she tweeted a story about COVID-19 outbreak in a Muslim congregation which met during lockdown. The third one was in August 2020, when the Washington Post published another opinion piece by Rana on the rise of Islamophobia and the spreading of anti-Muslim propaganda in Modi’s India.
The report by ICFJ also explicitly states that “Twitter is the main vector of online violence against Ayyub”, and while the platform has “failed to respond to the abuse”, it has allowed her attackers “to proliferate virtually unchecked and abuse her with impunity”. The report also talks about the legal cases pending against her, including the money laundering and tax fraud cases that were filed when she fundraised money for people affected by COVID-19.
Stating that “all Ayyub has to do is ‘open her mouth’ on Twitter to attract abuse”, the analysis found that she starts receiving abuse within 14 seconds of posting a tweet, and there is a spike in abusive replies within one to two minutes. The instances of abuse are categorised into three main types: attacks on professional credibility, personal attacks, and belief-based attacks. The primary topics associated with the most frequently occurring abusive terms are related to Muslims, Islam, Pakistan, India, and religion.
The attacks also had a coordinated nature. “The speed of abusive replies is noteworthy as a potential indicator of coordination or orchestration,” it said. Upon plotting a graph of the 500 accounts which sent the most abuse to Rana, the report found a dense, inter-connected network.
The characteristics of the attacks on Rana Ayyub are very similar to those deployed against other women journalists whose cases are also studied by ICFJ, including Nobel laureate Maria Ressa and Al Jazeera’s Ghada Oueiss.
“While her experiences are far from unique in India, her case is emblematic of the targeting of female journalists in the country. The hallmarks of these attacks are the digital ‘lynch mobs’ that align themselves with India’s Hindu nationalist ruling party. Such attacks are invariably overtly misogynistic and disinformation-laced. In Ayyub’s case, they also operate at the intersection of religious bigotry, with her Muslim faith being targeted in attacks that have seen her branded a ‘jihadi’ and a ‘terrorist’. These attacks are fanned and fuelled by heavily partisan tabloid TV networks and propaganda websites masquerading as news outlets that frame her critical reporting and commentary for international news organisations as evidence of foreign influence and disloyalty to India, making her an even bigger target,” the report concluded.