Preeti Yadav says she raised her son to be a “good person”. Pranshu, 16, was a Class 10 student of a public school in Ujjain and a self-taught make-up artist with nearly 30,000 followers on Instagram. His Diwali reel, which shows him wearing a sari, is flooded with 50,000 comments, many of them filled with vitriol and homophobic threats. On November 21, Pranshu died by suicide. “The only thing consoling me right now is that my son is no longer in a world that revels in the death of a child who has never harmed anyone. If you go through his profile, you realise that he never lost his dignity even when haters said the most distressing things to him,” says Preeti. A six-member Special Investigation Team (SIT) has been put together to probe the case and the police are going through Pranshu’s phone records and social media handles. Preeti says she was always supportive of her son’s decisions, but he was “relentlessly bullied in-person and virtually”. “When he told me he wanted to create make-up reels, I was supportive of his decision… I didn’t want his world to be constricted. But look at how hate found its way to him,” says Preeti. Relentless scrutiny and online bullying In a world that's online 24x7, where the youth commit to putting their lives and themselves under the social media microscope, the relentless scrutiny can be tough, especially on queer youths. According to the 2023 US National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ Young People, 41% of the 28,000 youth surveyed seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year. Most of them were subjected to online bullying, survey findings revealed. While a similar study is not available in India, The Indian Express spoke to a cross section of young queer Indians who are active on social media about the bullying they deal with day in, day out. Many of them accused social media platforms of doing little despite hate speech being reported by them. Purav Nagi, an 18-year-old make-up artist, says he is bombarded with hate comments within minutes of him putting up a new reel on Instagram. “I have been subjected to rape threats, even death threats. I was very scared initially because I had done nothing to give rise to such hatred. Though these comments disturbed me earlier, I laugh at them now. I have transitioned from being hurt to being strong,” says Purav. The first-year student of a Mumbai-based junior college says he has flagged hate comments he receives on Instagram, but little has been done about them. “I don’t think Instagram is doing enough to protect us,” he says. While there is no specific law on cyber bullying, a lawyer said such cases can be registered under Section 507 of IPC (offence of criminal intimidation by anonymous communication), which is punishable with imprisonment for a term that may extend to two years. When The Indian Express reached out to Meta, Instagram’s parent company, with questions on online bullying of queer individuals in India, a Meta spokesperson replied, “We have clear rules against hate speech and bullying, and take action on this content when we become aware of it, whether that's through our proactive detection tools or reports from our community. We’re committed to ensuring that Instagram is a positive experience for everyone, particularly teenagers and members of groups that may be vulnerable.” To a query on how many Indian content moderators the company employs to understand the nature of bullying of Indian queer content creators, the spokesperson added, “We have around 40,000 people working on safety and security, with more than $20 billion invested in teams and technology in this area since 2016. The teams have the ability to review content in 70 global languages, including 20 Indian languages.” Since he feels that Instagram’s handling of hate comments “leaves much to be desired”, Shivam, a 25-year-old queer make-up influencer with around 40,000 followers, has devised his own way to deal with online hate. He says, “Whenever I see my reels or posts go viral, I switch off the notifications. I know there are some who will spew venom for no reason at all.” Referring to Instagram’s special feature that allows a user to mute posts with certain words in one’s account, Shivam says, “We can mute some of the words through hashtags since they trigger us, but haters always find a way around it.” Bullies versus queer organisations Not just individuals, even some queer organisations feel their pages are targeted unfairly — little or no action is taken against accounts that bullied them, while their social media pages are taken down by the platforms. Earlier this year, Shyam Konnur, 35, the founder director of Pune-based MIST LGBTQ Foundation, woke up to find his Instagram page suspended for the second time. The community-based organisation works on issues related to health and advocacy for the queer community. "All our posts are about the events we organise or about the initiatives we take for the community. There simply cannot be any post that violates the platform’s ‘community guidelines’,” he says. Talking about the first time MIST’s profile was suspended, he says, “We reported the issue to Instagram and were told the suspension was a ‘mistake’. This time, we did not even have the option to appeal.” After Shyam and the others reached out to Meta directly, the page was restored with a simple explanation — it got “suspended by mistake”. “Instagram or Meta’s community guidelines are extremely vague. They are quick to take down pages like ours, but when it comes to hate or trigger content, we don’t see any action,” he says. Stating that hate comments reported by him were never taken down, he adds, “A certain politician made disparaging comments about the community while talking about his political opponent. I reported the comment, but nothing was done.” When Anil Ukrande, the founder of Yutak Trust, an organisation working for the LGBTIAQ community, helped organise the first-ever Pride March in Nashik in 2023 he was not expecting the tsunami of online hate. “It was the first time Nashik had a Pride, but the hate it generated online, especially on Instagram, was staggering. So much so that the organisers of the Pride March, who ran a small support group in the city, disabled their online profiles. The organisation has since then stopped working. We reported the hate comments, but they were never taken down,” he claims. Nishtha Berry, a media professional and an Instagram influencer who talks about LGBTQIA issues, faced a similar predicament. Berry, whose content revolves around the queer community and feminism, says, “A few days back, Instagram removed my reel that had almost 1 million views. They claimed it violated their rules on bullying. The reel featured a cab driver mistaking me for a man and saying offensive things about women. My reel simply exposed people’s mentalities.” She adds, “Instagram threatened to delete my account if I continued to post such content. It also turned down all my attempts to restore that reel. It’s frustrating that they removed my truth, while misogynistic content thrives on the platform.” To a query on how Meta assesses if decisions made by content moderators and AI systems are accurate in the absence of an effective feedback or grievance mechanism, the spokesperson said, “Users have the ability to challenge decisions made by content moderators and AI using our reporting tools.” The mother of a teenage boy who died by suicide in 2022 after he was allegedly bullied and sexually assaulted at school, says, “People don’t realise how bullying affects sensitive people, be it online or in-person. I don’t understand why social media platforms don’t take down accounts of these trolls. There should be some mechanism to protect our children and to ensure there are repercussions for bullies.” For Pranshu’s mother Preeti, the solution is simple. She says, “Accounts of bullies should be taken down. My son was so young and shouldn’t have been subjected to such hate.”
