Social Media Trolling: From Parvathy To Anand Mahindra

Anyone who is very active on social media knows what you can get for expressing public opinion – trolling. In most cases, it gets very ugly.

According to Wikipedia, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response, or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.

Trolls look for a reason to target a celebrity or known person and often take out their frustration in life using pure hatred. They don’t need a reason to do it, they will find a reason to spread venom or insult someone. When you look at the way they work, they use slander, insults and name calling to get an emotional response from that person. It often leads to serious forms of cyberbullying.

Malayalam actor Parvathy was cyberbullied for her comment on the superstar film “Kasaba”, and that trolling is still happening in every her posts. For a nearly decade, Malayalam television star, Ranjini Haridas was trolled, abused and insulted. Some others who trolled were Sonam Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra.

Recently, Anand Mahindra of Mahindra and Mahinda, was trolled for a tweet making fun of scene in a Telugu film ‘Balayya’ starring Nandamuri Balakrishna:

But later he realized that he will be attacked by countless fans of the star will attack him even calling for a boycott of his company. Some made the attack calling out bad service in sale showroom or service station. I can understand that a disgruntled customer calling for the bad service, but using that to tear someone for saying something which you believe hurt your fan sentiments makes no sense.

The Telegu films have been known for such supernatural scenes for decades. I have seen people justifying such scenes calling it as sarcastic scenes on Facebook. Shouldn’t we call for better movies than taking it as a personal attack on the film industry as a whole?

We, as Indians have taken the job of taking offence as our national job, we take immense gratification in creating memes and trolling people. If you are still going to justify it anyway, you don’t understand it.

“With social media comes great powers, With power, comes great responsibility.”

You should watch this video how to understand how a tweet can destroy someone’s life.