A virtual race‘ist’!

Twitteratti woke up to a very unlikely tweet from Vodafone this week. It read, “VodafoneUK: is fed up of dirty homos and is going after beaver”. A suspected hack turned out to be the work of a naughty customer staff serviceman. Vodafone immediately issued an apology to its 9,185 followers and suspended the employee but the brand reputation was already damaged with hundreds retweeting the abusive message.
Facebook users are also invited to hate groups like ‘I hate F****ing country like India’ and ‘Hate Pakistan’ (showing 103 proud members with a display picture of a heap of severed hands, legs and torsos as bait). With malicious comments made on race, religion, colour of skin and even your mother, is this a party youngsters want to attend?
“Social networking sites are no longer used just to ‘connect’ with friends but also to hit out against your ‘enemies’,” opines Nilima Prajwal, 24, software engineer, who has faced the wrath of racists online, “While viewing Atif Aslam’s videos on YouTube I saw comments of Indians calling Pakistani’s ‘Porkistani’ and Pakistani’s accusing Indians of being talentless. I soon got caught in a nonsensical debate with this person who then started spamming my inbox with expletive hate mail and how according to this article by the BBC, condoms are too large for Indian men.”
A distressing experience, she finally reported him as spam and had his account banned. She believes it was the accessibility and the anonymity that the Internet gave her that brought out her ugly side. “I would have never gotten into a debate like this in real life but I knew that on the Internet no one can find me and hunt me down.”
Many believe that online bashing can lead people in the wrong direction and create a sense of hate or fear against the person or group. “These people are not professors giving researched gyaan, just losers with too much time on their hands to make ridiculous statements like ‘all Aussies hate stinky Indians’, says feels Inchara Jaganath, 21, who is studying in Australia, “After reading such comments, I became paranoid when I shouldn’t because my personal experience with Australians is nothing like that.”
This week after a tweetup went wrong at Café Coffee Day in Chennai, almost 650 people tweeted with a #ccdsucks hashtag and posted abuses against the organisation, in spite of them apologising officially. Kanchan Nathan, 23, creative analyst at Yahoo! feels, “People put up abusive messages as they want the most number of comments and hits. It’s all about attention-seeking.”
Whatever the reason, it’s clear that youngsters do not want their Internet browsing experience to be spoiled by immature tit for tat abuses.