Photo source: thebetterndia.com
A 20-year-old girl whose father was killed in the Kargil war uploaded a video with a series of placards passing on a message of peace. She assumed it would spread love and peace among both the countries. Her step backfired, as she herself got angry remarks, rape threats and being bullied over the social media by Indians. She gave up and also withdrew her agitation against ABVP.
What went wrong? If you look closely, things went wrong at many places. She lost support from people on social media because people focused on one of her placard that read 'Pakistan did not kill my father, war did.'
How did this happen? ALL human beings operate through cognitive biases when they come across something. These biases act like sunglasses or colored glasses, so the way we perceive things isn't always accurate. One such bias led people only to selectively focus on a seemingly negative aspect of her whole video and ignoring the bigger picture. Such focus is backed by some truth (eg. Pakistan army actually intruded the Indian territory at Kargil and killed many soldiers including her father). So the readers perceived her statement as false, as an insult to the whole nation, and many got angry and offended. People like GurMehar are soft targets for bullying too. Many respected personalities also took offense and condemned her action.
Other cognitive biases involved were labeling the whole person as bad (antinational), jumping to conclusion (she is hostile), disqualifying the rest of the positive messages in her campaign, thinking that the whole post by her was bad when only a part of it was not written carefully as she didn't even anticipate that framing of the sentence in that way would seriously backfire. The audience failed to empathize with her situation, pain, and motives. Since cyberbullying is pretty easy, as easy as sharing a post, commenting or liking, people went ahead and joined the masses. Since we have a low tolerance, low acceptance of others and high impulsivity these days, things escalated pretty quick.
In the whole process, she backed off, sending out a message to all the girls all over the world. "Keep your mouth shut!"
Dr. Shishir Palsapure is a trained psychotherapist and supervisor for therapists, life coach, and a life skills trainer.
