Fighting for Their Voice: Understanding Indian Muslim Women's Responses to Networked Harassment

Abstract

Social computing researchers have described how online harassment is taking on more sophisticated forms where communities rather than lone individuals carry out attacks. At the same time, those who are targeted are coming together with members of the online crowd to confront this networked harassment. However, we currently lack empirical studies of how such self-organizing efforts take place, especially in non-western contexts like India. To address this gap, this paper examines two case studies of gendered Islamophobia, Sulli Deals and Bulli Bai where a group of Indian Muslim women were targeted via fake auctions hosted on GitHub, that were subsequently amplified over social media. We conducted 12 in-depth interviews with the women targeted in these incidents to understand how these women collectively made sense of these incidents, and the social and spiritual resources they drew upon as they constructed a response together. Our findings describe how our participants understood these incidents (e.g. with families and each other); the work they did to combat the harassment (e.g. coordinating a unified media response); and how religious beliefs and spiritual practices played into this (e.g. values around courage, patience, flexibility, and humility). We conclude by discussing how these findings can refresh our understanding of designing community-driven responses to networked harassment.