Facebook remembers things about me that I wiped from my own memory a long time ago. Since I joined in 2006 I have been invited to 1,920 events, including the fifth birthday party of Movida, a long-defunct London nightclub; wake-like drinks to mark the start of the Brexit process; and a vegan conference (I have never been vegan). It also records my membership of a bewildering array of groups, including one for followers of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu-nationalist paramilitary organisation, and another for people who grew up in Huntington, West Virginia, once “America’s fattest city” (I am neither a Hindu-nationalist nor an obese American).
I wasn’t trawling through social media to reminisce about teenage nights out, or my more recent adventures as a foreign correspondent. Instead, I was on a mission to delete myself from the internet. My reasons were practical rather than ideological. I was about to host a podcast about India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. Any reporter who wades into the debate on Modi’s high-growth agenda or Islamophobic comments risks becoming a target for online abuse.
Especially if they’re a woman. The International Federation of Journalists, a union, estimates that almost two-thirds of female reporters have endured online abuse. In South Asia, that share is undoubtedly higher: many female colleagues have been targeted by trolls, who publish their home addresses and send them death threats. One Indian investigative journalist told me someone had superimposed her face onto a woman in a pornographic video before circulating it online. Taking down as much personal information as I could seemed prudent. | | |
