Hyderabad: Weighing in your words carefully becomes important, especially if you are a widely followed celebrity on social media. As the Israel-Gaza conflict continues to spark a proxy war on the Internet, celebrities are getting themselves caught in the crossfire.
The most recent one to join the brigade is Disney’s pop princess Selena Gomez. Her “It’s about humanity. Pray for Gaza” caption alongside an unrelated image of her on Instagram, enraged the world. But she’s not the only one who decided to weigh in on the two weeks of fighting between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Chetan Bhagat provoked the Twitterati with this inputs. Apart from saying that what’s happening in Gaza is “the only way sometimes terrorist organisations and their supporters learn to behave” and thinking that “Israel has made its point,” he went on to clarify that “all his tweets should be read together” to be understood.
To which angry tweeple replied. “It’s okay to shut up if you don’t know about a topic. You don’t HAVE to have an opinion on everything,” says Prachi, a blogger.
So what happens when celebrities sit on the fence about pressing issues like these? “This leads to further chaos and makes suggestible minds vulnerable,” says psychologist, Archana Sundar. ‘Bombing for peace what bullshit!!! #PrayForGaza,’ reads Arjun Kapoor’s tweet. “It’s better to take a stance like Arjun and stick to it than sway to public opinion which they created in the first place,” she adds.
