Thread by @joyopal

We studied anti-feminist Indian groups on Twitter

TL;DR
Emerged during #MeToo
Overlaps with SSR, Hindutva groups on #BoycottBollywood , Anti-Chandrachud campaign
Organized around Shraddha Walker by moving to Islamophobia
Top profile descriptions: students, engineers, lawyers
🧵

Trigger alerts: Several of the media items here are likely to trigger reactions While we have removed identifying information, and filtered highly offensive content, even the material we are willing to show here is misogynistic and abusive on multiple levels.

The anti-feminist MRA (Men’s Rights Activsts) movement has grown in India online since India’s MeToo revelations on Twitter, it argues that women take undue advantage of laws and norms. MRA groups are active on Twitter, but many have offline meetups.

The main thrust of MRAs offline is around dowry and alimony disputes, but online, the main thrust is anti-feminism, much of the most successful messaging involves body-shaming, doxing, and attacks on well-known feminist females and their allies

We built five samples, representing over 3 Million tweets and retweets with MRA content. The main sample is a timeline of accounts identified as consistently posting MRA / Anti-feminist content. We analyzed this content for the overall patterns and themes.

The next four samples were around incidents – the Marital Rape Judgment Tweets, the DY Chandrachud Chief Justice appointment attacks online, the Shraddha Walker Murder Case and messaging around Richa Chadha’s statement on Galwan.

Timeline: We find a few peaks – first is on Women’s Day, there is a huge amount of anti-feminist content driven by organized hashtagging, we then find peaks around the Depp vs Heard trial, and finally around the Marital Rape case proceedings.

The pattern of Twitter account formation, and the disappearance of several accounts during the course of this study suggest a high degree of offensive tweeting leading to bans, and organized efforts to whip up support prior to major online organizing around events.

The key organizations in the MRA community are Save Indian Family Foundation (SIFF), Sahodar India Trust, Voice For Men India, the top influencers are women, which gives the MRA community greater legitimacy.

A woman journalist @DeepikaBhardwaj is the top MRA influencer.

The MRA community tends to be self-contained – most of their content is endogamous, they get outside engagement only when they get into broader issues like Bollylionwood, CJI etc. They call out government/politician/influencer handles frequently, rarely ever get responses.

Self-described “engineers” are most vocal in quantum of anti-feminist messaging, and most likely to build engagement. We plot the retweet networks & find there are clusters of MRAs, typically around professions. Students are prominent, but self-contained. Here's a network graph

MRAs use handle callouts when they tweet There are callouts to official handles eg @PMOIndia @MinistryWCD @sharmarekha (chair of NCW) as well as media – the most called out handles are @Republic @ZeeNewsEnglish. Rarely any of these respond or retweet.

MRAs also call out individual influencers, usually women who are outspoken about women’s rights and gender violence. The most trolled and abused include journalist @fayedsouza author @namitabhandare poet @meenakandasamy @ReallySwara & feminist handle @SheThePeople

Right-leaning influencer accounts have put out tweets that have been very popular in the MRA community incl tweet on godman @Sadgurujv talk on Feminism (at Mount Carmel college in 2018) and much activity disparaging actor Tanushree Mitra’s harassment accusation on Nana Patekar

We found four instances of coordinated viral tweeting.

1. An organized attempt to undermine the credibility of CJI Chandrachud, who took feminist positions on certain judgments. We see trending anti-CJI content when his appointment was announced and when he became CJI

Most of the anti-Chandrachud tweets are carried with Quote-tweeted messages on his positions on women’s issues, but even his son is attacked. A lot of the anti-CJI activity is also engaged in by pro-Hindutva accounts using #NotMyCJI #LegalTerrorism hashtags

2. The MRA community has built on the Twitter hysteria around the Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard defamation lawsuit (incidentally driven viral by US-based anti-feminist activists). We see “Indian Johnny Depp” and #AblaNari consistently used by the community

3. They present the Shraddha Walker Murder case not as domestic violence, but rather as “love jihad”. The big viral tweet among MRAs came from pro-Hindutva influencer account @Voice_For_India which absolved men and presented the case as solely related to faith.

The MRAs repeatedly resort to shaming Shraddha on values focusing on religion, parents/family norms, ”woke feminism”, liberalism, live in relationships or woke feminism. A Wordcloud generated from the tweet texts on Shraddha Waker shows these.

The overall trend was victim blaming. Influencer account @DeepikaBhardwaj put the onus on the murdered woman, and a series of messages from less influential accounts within the MRA networks followed. Indian feminists are often blamed for interfaith relationships in tweets.

4. There was coordinated tweeting around actor @RichaChadha on account of her message on Galwan, the messages are replies are misogynistic, advocate violence. One of the top drivers for the MRA community tweeting against her was @akshaykumar

At one point, #RichaChadha was used at will to gain traction for unrelated tweets, since there was consistent trolling and retweeting of messages with her name in them.

We thematically coded the stylistic elements around the tweets. First, we find that the use of humour, sarcasm and memefication is a consistent theme – making jokes around feminism, relationships, gold-digging etc.

First theme is the use of pop culture. We find pop culture references from OTTs, Hollywood, Moosewala etc. Thus a lot of the content is aimed at consumers of this content – young Indian males. Tweets use acronyms Red/Blue pill MGTOW that younger people are more familiar with.

The second theme is body shaming to suggest feminism is incompatible with popularly defined good looks. Body shaming is effective since it is presented as funny, whereas it has the same effect as other forms of extreme or hateful speech

Attacks on independent powerful women including MPs @RenukaChowdhury actor @nanditadas journalists @BDUTT @sagarikaghose and lawyer @karunanundy are common, these are often made by accounts named for females, which adds legitimacy that they are being criticized by “their own”.

Another theme is anti-westernization, which presents reactionary conceptions of women in familial/social life. Actor Jaya Bachchan, who told her grand-daughter she wouldn’t judge her for having a child out of wedlock was heavily trolled.

Another theme on Westernization is calling out failures in US policy as suggestive that feminism is also flawed. We find several analogies of western policy failure used as examples to present how feminism sets up the stage for dysfunction.

Another theme was the use of incel language such as “taking the red pill” (from Matrix) or using the term “simp” to describe or insult (usually a man) who self-identifies as a feminist, ostensibly to deter male allies from making pro-feminist statements.

Another theme was fearmongering, typically used with the hashtag #BoycottMarriage claiming that young men were being set up to be abused in marriages and cheated by women using various examples to highlight reputational harm and present women in a directly antagonistic frame.

Another stylistic element is of showing incidents of class violence such as fights with rickshaw drivers, apartment complex security, maintenance staff etc as cases of female aggression rather than as class entitlement.

Another theme was Dogwhistles. We find the words like “appeasement” & “separatism” referring to feminists. These have both traditionally been used in context of Muslims, thus suggesting a pampered group overstepping boundaries because of debased institutions.

We repeatedly see the economics of divorce being referred to, focusing on alimony, inheritance, and dowry. Several tweets highlight individual cases where a male partner is purported to have been treated poorly by a legal battle against a spouse,

We also found three distinct outreach strategies that show that the organization of content is artificially driven. The first is the use of copyasta techniques as we see here - several accounts that are named around “Sahodar” an MRA organization, copy and paste the same messages

An important strategy is dovetailing – this refers to using language that suggests interest in a different issue that has more purchase online.

We see here dovetailing on caste by using explicit casteist language or calls out to casteism by women, to get online support.

A second case is that of the use of #BoycottBollywood – we see in these tweets that the MRA community intersects with the Sushant Singh Rajput community and with the anti-Mahesh Bhatt family tweeting, which is popular in Hindutva circles.

We also found some reverse dovetailing, in this, some Twitter accounts that are ostensibly supporters of godmen who have been in trouble with their own cases of murder and rape including Asaram Bapu and Gurmeet Ram Rahim dovetail on MRA-related hashtags and their communities.

The final strategy we see is of the MRA community pointing out that it is not just a movement on social media, by highlighting their activities offline through featuring groups of men at MRA meetups.

Dovetailing is helped by the “Gems of... ” suite of Twitter accounts which take anti-liberal positions.

Made popular by the Gems of Bollywood account, this crew has since gone after history, news, courts etc and is promoted by two pro-BJP influencers listed on the accounts

The top professions listed in the MRA accounts’ profiles were Engineers, Software developers, and Students. Although most accounts are unverified, the plethora of language or metaphor popular with younger people suggests this is driven by or aimed at the youth.

This is work done by two bright undergraduates - Shreya Agarwal and Urvashi Patel.

The full paper, methodology and appendices are available at: joyojeet.people.si.umich.edu/antifeminist/