Barkha Dutt: belief

Transcript context

…You’re on Twitter. How is Indian Twitter different from, say, USA Twitter? I don’t think it’s different. I think everywhere, trolling is an organized, well-oiled machine. It can be either political or paid. It targets women in a language that it spares men on. It is caught in the polarities of right and left. It’s a whole lot of noise. You learn the hard way to not read your mentions, or to speed-read them. You grow a really thick skin, and you use it for what it’s good for. It’s good for a few things. It connects you to people across continents and cultures. If you’re a journalist and you’re interested in being exposed to a variety of thoughts, it exposes you to all of that. It helps you find interesting speakers for your programs and for your reports. Sometimes — I spent two years covering the pandemic — it connects; it creates a community of very kind strangers. We had a massive shutdown of public transport in our first lockdown. I had people from Twitter saying, “Oh, do you need a place to stay here? You can stay here. Do you need food? We’ll send you food. Do you need shoes? We’ll send you shoes.” It’s a community. You have to know what to take from it. Otherwise, it is political as hell, it is noisy as hell, it is coarse as hell, and it’s a terrible place to be for women. I’d say in the United States, there’s a considerable backlash on Twitter against the possibility that Elon Musk will buy Twitter, which may very well happen. Is there a similar feeling in India? Or do people just shrug their shoulders, “Uh, some other rich guy from far away.”…

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