He’d tried to report the aggressor accounts before, but was dismissed. Threatening language used online is notoriously hard to prove actually malicious, after all, and much of it is bundled haphazardly under the umbrella of free speech protections.
So Chopra was surprised when Twitter actually acted, suspending his account and asking him to delete speech less corrosive than the death threats he’d received. His last tweets, Chopra says, were written in parody of far-right Hindu nationalists’ celebration of vigilante justice and violence, and Twitter only intervened when pressured by an IT cell working on behalf of the Indian government.
Acquiescing and deleting the offending posts in order to access the social media platform one more time, Chopra made a statement blasting what he saw as Twitter’s hypocrisy for allowing violent threats by supporters of India’s ruling party but not dissent. Twitter, Chopra notes, “hid behind the fig leaf of free speech in refusing to act on complaints against death and rape threats that adherents of the Hindu Right routinely issued but conveniently—and inconsistently—invoked ‘community standards’ to shut down speech critical of [India’s ruling party].” He was further puzzled by his account’s suspension given that Twitter itself had earlier sent him a message confirming that the tweets did not violate those same community standards.
“I was making a political point, that Twitter in India was hypocritical because they were hiding behind free speech to allow people to make vile threats,” he says. “Nothing I said violated free speech law, yet I was cast out.”
Like many other social scientists, Chopra thinks “cancel culture”—used to describe the phenomenon of being publicly shamed and losing status for saying things or acting in ways deemed problematic or offensive by society at large—is lazy terminology, much too one-size-fits all to accurately represent the myriad ways public commentary has evolved as it’s moved online.
But it’s also true that Chopra was, quite literally, canceled. Or at least access to his favorite app-based soapbox was.