Thread by @law_ninja

What’s up with the apology?

So the tweetstorm that started last night has not subsided, and it’s mostly about why LawSikho and I have not apologised for last night’s webinar with Kshitij Sehrawat, a dating coach.

Actually, there are lots of questions. It is possible that if I answer that one question in one way, as in the nature of mobs on social media, it would be overly generalised, taken out of context and further retweetable content created out of it.

So I would at least save you the trouble, create all the content for you myself and in the process hopefully will be able to convey the entire story of what happened last night.

Let me unpack the questions one by one.

There are 4 primary questions that we have identified. As a team, we had to answer that.
Why as a team? Why not just Ramanuj Mukherjee?

I had actually typed out a statement in the wee hours of the morning on Saturday, that my team absolutely refused to let me send out.

Instead, we sent out a bare minimum statement that we could easily get behind, remind our community of the values we stand for and point out that there was a whole lot of misrepresentation in what several people have been posting.

Now, who is going to take responsibility and apologise? As the CEO, the buck stops with me, of course.

However, my team came together and decided that it’s not only my personal integrity that is in question here, but of the organization. They are facing significant blow back, and their pride of working for the organization is at stake. Hence, I must not act unilaterally.

And we decided that we will put out an apology only when we are able to come to some sort of common ground and conclusion after hearing everyone out.

Twitter storm can wait! We have to find our principled and jointly owned stance on the subject first.

Out of about 67 team members we have in our team, we had around 35 people want to join in a call that lasted for hours, as we heard each other out, and tried to understand where we went wrong.

We thrashed out a lot of stuff, agreed on some and disagreed on some.

Some of us felt we must not make the webinar video public again because it may hurt the sensibility of some people. Others really want to put it back up in interest of transparency plus stopping the malicious fake narratives that were being spread to make it sound worse than it

actually was.

Many of us wanted to just put out an unconditional apology about it. Others wanted to make sure that our side and the entire story was heard.

And we have lots of very brilliant persuasive people in our team.

So it took lots of time.

Now, let’s get to that part.

Here are the 4 questions.

The first one is entirely personal and only I can take responsibility for it.
Should I have shouted at Avanti, the person who joined the call on my invitation to share a negative female perspective as to why our conversation was sexist?

It started with her making what I felt was a factual misrepresentation. I interjected and tried to correct her, following which she taunted me, following which I got visibly angry and shouted at her and shut her down.

I simply was out of line. I should not have done that as a webinar host, nor as LawSikho CEO, nor as the person that I think I am.

No matter the fact that I was being targeted viciously through personal messages as well as public chat with taunts like “Ramanuj do you beat your wife” “Why are you such an incel” “You should just die” “when did you last have any”, I should not have lost my cool.

I could handle the criticism much more calmly, as I normally do in any webinar when at the end I invite feedback and criticism.

The difference this time was that I am simply not used to that level of hostility that I was facing at the moment.

In my feeble defence, my focus was shifting between chats and the speaker and the person asking questions, as some people were intentionally causing disturbances by posting the same message tens of times.

The chat box was moving at such speed I could hardly keep track at this time. And of course, we had Avanti on mic, who I later found out was bullied in the chats which I did not realise at that time, and she was already triggered when she came on the call.

I am sorry that you had a bad experience on that count too, Avanti, on our platform. Lots of sexist comments were posted by anonymous attendees, hurtful things were being posted, and I was unable to monitor or manage it. Very, very sorry about that.

Same to any other women who were targeted.

The anger in Avanti’s voice, when she was telling me about how we influence younger men, riled me up as well.

My intention for doing the webinar was entirely different!

I felt like I was losing control of the situation, and I resorted to anger. After around 70 minutes of live webinar, and the end of a very long day, I just wanted the stressful situation to end.

And at this time, I made the mistake of shutting out Avanti, which was not fair or appropriate at all.

I should not have shouted at you Avanti, sorry.

This does not happen to me much, and I am sorry I did not have the patience to hear you out before offering my reaction peacefully.

However, I wish you did not make my situation in that moment worse by attacking me, by saying things like: “You do not get girls because you do not let them speak”. I can see why you said that, but it just escalated things.

Anyway, I regret that this happened, and I would shudder if any of my students told me they were dominated like this during one of our classes.

In fact, today I got a text from one of my students about an argument he had with one of our evaluators. He was very upset and wanted me to do something about it.

That is when I really realised what I did during the webinar. I dominated you, did not allow you to make a point, made you feel like your points are not worth any attention. Horrible.

I am terribly sorry for treating you that way. I hope you will accept my unconditional apology for this.

But this was just one question, there are three others that my amazing team identified.

Should we apologise for the content of the webinar?

Maybe because I was part of the webinar, or because I was seeing things from a defensive lens, even today afternoon I could not understand what was wrong with the webinar.

Many male and female colleagues said they did not think it was good content, but not something we need to apologise for.

I was in this camp as well.

But others vociferously disagreed.

My point was that I had given a long monologue at the outset with disclaimers and establishing base rules about consent, agency and objectification, made it clear that I do not agree with many of his ideas and fundas, plus I kept moderating Kshitij’s answers

whenever I felt he was stereotyping etc., and to which he always promptly issued clarifications.

Some of my colleagues told me why they are very worried about this content. After listening to them for a while, I could understand their concerns.

But I do not entirely agree with them. I do not want to offer a fake apology where I am yet to be convinced. Some women have a problem with the entire concept of a male dating coaching existing for that matter, or the idea that men would want to learn how to be better at dating

- I find that a bit too much.

There are some things, such as Kshitij referring to himself as a number (going from 6 to 8, not about women), or saying I have field experience, and women having a problem with that - I feel is just oversensitive.

You can disagree, dislike, say its not cool - but isn’t apologising for this too much? Still not convinced.

But there is something else.

One thing is that I fully agree that the content was not what I was aiming for. It could be better.

And I should have shut down the bloody chats. It was very distracting on that occasion, with people engaging in a confusing level of interaction, and I could not figure out whether they were fighting or just joking around.

I tried to warn them. It worked for a while, and then back to square one. At one point, I shut down the chat when I saw some sexist comments.

Immediately, several women started sending me personal messages saying please allow us to respond, you are shutting us out from responding, you don’t need to protect us etc.

Others referred to freedom of speech and necessity for discussions. So I opened up the chat again. This later turned out to be the greatest mistake.

Anyway, I could definitely do a better job at moderation, and I should not have been distracted. I could do a better job at addressing any problematic content and I should have.

Low quality content is bad, but not a big deal.

Unfortunately, some of that content Kshitij said was sexist too, when I reviewed the webinar with my colleagues later, and I realised that I did not do a stellar job at countering that in the webinar.

In most cases I did clarify, but in some cases I missed.

One of my female colleagues told me that she thought I should have countered what Kshitij said in terms of stereotypes more forcefully.

I get it that I should have been definitely more careful and paid more attention.

So for any sexist comments having filtered through unmoderated and unmanaged, in the webinar and in chats, I apologise.

Plus the experiment failed. Things really went out of hand. Our brand is definitely impacted. Some allies alienated over this experiment.

To be honest, people who know us well, did not lose trust or faith. Some distant good wishers mostly resorted to value signalling and no real engagement.

The hate basically came from unknown people who judged me as well as LawSikho based on a 3 minute clip and some misleading bullet points circulated by a few people.

We seem to have paid more than we bargained for.

Anyway, lessons learned.

I feel sorry for myself, and more than that, my colleagues, who had to go through so much hate because of this one experiment. I have apologised to them as well.

Next question.
Should we have called Kshitij Sehrawat for a webinar in the first place?

To be clear, I had relied on a couple of colleagues' recommendations here.

My job was to just hold the webinar. I do not really vet people before calling them, usually they are top lawyers doing great work that we all know about.

Still suspecting that there may be some landmines given the sensitiveness of the topic, I decided to have a talk with Kshitij before announcing the webinar.

He said he swears by consent, is not interested in objectifying women, and told me how he has evolved over the years. It was a positive conversation, and we even discussed how he is going to become a dating coach who is creating a new way apart from toxic masculinity.

I learned a lot about the trauma healing workshops he offers.

I felt that this is a person I can work with. We went ahead.

I was a little worried about being able to navigate all this right, but I took it up as a challenge.

I intend to engage with people I disagree with. (ya, I know, does not look like I engage if you judge me by that 3 minutes clip but then please consider your own worst 3 minutes in life perhaps. Everyone gets angry or messes up in an interaction. I am not my 3 minute of anger.)

I want to be able to invite edgy people to my platform, even someone most other platforms will shy away from. This is with a view to engage with different views within the human race and cross pollination of ideas.

For example, Oxford Union invites most controversial people from all over the world to come and debate. I am fancying doing something like that with the LawSikho webinar platform some day.

I want to call world's leading thinkers, philosophers, lawyers and even some of the less palatable infamous people and give them a platform to express themselves, in the spirit of hearing out those we do not want to hear at all.

Many of my colleagues in LawSikho are very much against this idea, and we found it impossible to come to a conclusion about it. I have some hesitations too.

What if someone comes and preaches islamophobia or genocide? Where do we draw the line? Can we handle such conversations with strong moderation? Is it even possible? Could we expect to run such an organization in India?

It is an evolving debate within the organization. For now we have decided that any unusual invitee or workshop or webinar ideas will first be discussed in our entire team, and opinions will be sought, and finally the marketing lead will take a call based on various feedback.

We intend to be able to invite such factions to be at the table to have a healthy debate, even to challenge their thinking, so that there is an opportunity to communicate, to include and to reduce hatred or societal division.

I do not like to think of certain segments of the people as outcasts, who should be denied any platform.

I understand that such quality of moderation of the content did not take place in the webinar we are all talking about, and that is my fault entirely.

But I hope this gives you some clue to our mysterious decision of calling a dating coach on a legal education platform.

The other big question is why would we do things that are so far flung from legal education?

Because we want to do different things. We did a cake baking session, dance lesson. We did a debate involving several senior lawyers on whether animal slaughter should be banned in India.

Another question we are frequently being asked:
Why did we take the original video down?

Oh man, I wish we didn’t. But some of our team members were feeling very strongly that this video - that it will offend the sensibility of many women so we must take it down. So we did.

Some people made video collages with screengrabs and putting comments out of context, just to make us even worse than it already is, and then those colleagues lost any justification to not put the video back up on youtube channel. And it has been up since evening.

Unfortunately every 3 minutes we are getting an outrage tweet saying please make it live and let us judge. Yes my friend, go to LawSikho youtube channel and please judge for yourself.

Although it is just easier to see some out of context clips specifically designed for misleading you. But it's your choice.

We will help those who want to see key points of the webinar with some time stamps. It will be up on our YouTube channel if anyone is curious.

By the way, this is a difficult time for all of us at LawSikho, because we are not really familiar with this level of hate or attention.

We are a small passionate company working away on our mundane stuff while the world debates carryminati.

And still, we are facing more criticism that a super sexist column, movie or entire magazine ever faces. I would be smug and think that it’s because you expect better from us.

Anyway, it took me a while to get used to all the name calling and lots of people threatening to hit me and all that happens when you are getting bashed on twitter. I now have a nice collection of screenshots, and I will unpack them on another occasion.