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In politics, oratory has been the fountainhead of political influencing. Regardless of season – pre-poll, post-poll or in the languid months well after new governments steady their course – orators bring colour and vitality to campaigns. In one speech, they can ignite the spark of a debate; in another, they can end a discourse and start a new one. Parties with the best orators have sustained their influence and held the public imagination for a long time. They have a face. They have an address. They have affiliations & social connections. In the age of AI and cyber livelihoods that we are unwittingly rushing into, political influencing is taking on a digital, dark and dubiously democratised shade. Recently, Tamil Nadu’s deputy Chief Minister & DMK leader Udhayanidhi Stalin found himself amid a controversy after his Instagram handle reposted pictures of a woman model. Deleted immediately, but the damage was done. Corrosive derision followed, unfurled by all opposition parties but led from the front by the virtual warriors of Vijay’s TVK. In the acrid cacophony, an unintended victim – about whom nobody seemed to care – was the model who got caught in the crossfire. This is not the first time that a woman found herself wrangled by political virtual warriors, and not the first time nobody glanced at her predicament. The TVK is the new animal in this wild world; political snipping on social media has been an art orchestrated to perfection by the BJP and the DMK, with frequent attacks carried out to ‘expose’ political enemies. Not one, but five reasons come to mind as to why the age of virtual warriors is the death of personal dignity: Real people as exhibits: For the virtual warriors, nothing but the target is visible (Dronacharya would be proud). Real people with friends, family, and personal dignity to protect are treated as collateral damage, willingly offered to the cause. No heart to forgive, enough memory to remember: The digital world, with its dirt-cheap cloud storage and intuitively inhuman algorithms, can bring up anything from the past. For politicians, this shouldn’t matter because they have an army to counter any unpleasant reminiscences; for those caught in the public crossfire, you are but a permanent impression in the binary expanse. Kiss your privacy goodbye! Weaponised anonymity: Hidden and firing from behind Fake IDs – sometimes with profile pictures and retweet history that suggest the opposite affiliation – these warriors have zero accountability, 100 per cent anonymity. Operating as a collective: One distasteful comment is a one-off thing. Landing in rapid succession, these are cyber missiles of a targeted attack. They influence the algorithm to maximise reach and draw eyeballs. The force of their influence is immediate and far-reaching. Trolling as a Service (TaaS): Does a troll have a conscience? Do they go back home to hug their children and feed them dinner after a hard day’s work of trolling vulnerable people? They do. Trolling as a culture is normalised. Not far from now (maybe it exists already), professional trolling can masquerade as ‘political cyber defence’ as a high point on the curriculum vitae. So, where is this heading? Where does this leave the governments and judicial offices that have promised their citizens the right to live with dignity? Some phenomena bring out the best of humanity while others draw us into the shadowy corners. It is up to the best of us to keep all humanity in the light of dignity, social order, and conscientious living.
