Another Horrible Day on the Internet: Celebs Sharing 'All Eyes on Rafah' Trolled

The ‘All Eyes on Rafah’ campaign garnered steam across social media to show solidarity with Palestinians.

Celebrities like Richa Chadha and Samantha Ruth Prabhu have been faced trolling for speaking up about Rafah.

(Photo Courtesy: Instagram/ altered by The Quint)

'Damned if you do, damned if you don't.'

There's no adage that rings truer than this when it comes to Bollywood celebrities and the internet calling them out for speaking up or NOT speaking up about the atrocities happening around the world.

It's happened again – this time for speaking up.

On 28 May, as the ‘All Eyes on Rafah’ campaign garnered steam across social media platforms in a form of solidarity with Palestinians after an airstrike killed more than 40 more people on Sunday, 25 May. Notably, the International Court of Justice directed Israel to "immediately halt its military offensive and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."

Several celebrities, including Priyanka Chopra, Alia Bhatt, Richa Chadha, Varun Dhawan, and Samantha Ruth Prabhu shared the purportedly AI-generated image on social media.

Particularly, this one (which has been shared a staggering 45 million times on Instagram alone):

(Photo Courtesy: Instagram)

However, there is another celebrity who made headlines – cricketer Rohit Sharma’s wife Ritika Sajdeh.

The probable reason? After she posted the message of support, she was heavily trolled for the same. She has since then deleted the story. The same thing happened with Bollywood actor Madhuri Dixit as well. And the trolling isn’t limited to Sajdeh – the comment section of every celebrity speaking out in support look the same and ‘Boycott Bollywood’ has started trending on X again.

(Photo Courtesy: Instagram) 

No End to Whataboutery on the Internet

The first thing that becomes obvious is the whataboutism or whataboutery.

What is whataboutism? Well, it’s a logical fallacy – it’s the practice of responding to something by making a counteraccusation or raising a different (albeit often important) issue to take away attention from the original problem.

Whataboutism doesn’t actually address the seriousness or the validity of the original problem at all – it’s used as a distraction, to paint the original poster as a ‘hypocrite’ making it about the ‘person’ instead of the issue being discussed.

This phenomenon is easily identified by the use of counteraccusations that begin with “what about…” In the current political landscape, these arguments are rarely made in good faith. Instead of actually looking at the heart of the problem and doing something to make the situation better, ‘whataboutists’ would rather just derail a conversation.

Reading the hate and vitriol under these celebrities’ posts (and this one too, I’m sure) brings a James Baldwin quote to mind:

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognising this may be incapable of morality.”

Is it really that alien to consider that someone who cares about human rights cares about the rights of all humans? That solidarity for one marginalised group or community doesn’t directly translate to hate for other marginalised groups? That a call to dismantle structures that endanger human rights will benefit us all?

(Photo Courtesy: Instagram)

(Photo Courtesy: Instagram)

It's Definitely Not the First Time (Or Will be the Last)!

During the #MeToo movement too, several feminists pointed out that these whataboutists would bring up cases of sexual assault among men only when the sexual violence women face was being discussed. But a feminist criticising sexual assault is calling out the power structure and culture that allows sexual violence to exist and go unchecked. People can hold empathy for multiple things at once – it is how empathy works.

(Photo Courtesy: X)

While there are multiple other examples, let’s go back to the time when pop-singer Rihanna voiced support during the farmers' protests in India in 2021. The same trolls alleged she was from a ‘toolkit gang’ (the fact that a ‘toolkit’ is the very basics of organising mass social movements is something we’re not even getting into right now) and asked her to ‘stay out of India’s business’. Not only that, trolls mocked her experience with intimate partner violence – because of a tweet.

(Photo Courtesy: X)

But when Indian celebrities post identical tweets that match their perspective and ideology, trolls don’t bring up the word ‘toolkit’ anymore. Suddenly, it’s all organic. But sharing the identical image for ‘All Eyes on Rafah’ is ‘paid’. If hypocrisy is what we want to highlight, maybe we needn’t look too far.

The “paid protestor” rhetoric comes up frequently and comes up way more often than the fact that protesting (and advocacy) is a democratic right. It is an argument often used by conspiracy theories to, once again, not actually addresses the issue at hand.

Former US president Donald Trump famously used it to lash out at people speaking against him by calling them “professional anarchists and paid protestors”. There is naturally rarely any proof of these accusations.

(Photo Courtesy: X)

For the past year, people have (rightfully) been calling out celebrities for not using their platforms to raise awareness. The reach they have not only increses visibility for a cause, it also makes it somewhat easier for others to do the same.

On that note, let’s, for a second, also look at how we treat people who do raise their voice. Actor like Swara Bhaskar and Richa Chadha who have been vocal activists for a long time often face trolling. Bhaskar said in an interview that voicing their opinion opens actors up to “vicious trolling and frankly irrelevant, stupid hateful messages”.

(Photo Courtesy: X)

(Photo Courtesy: X)

“Bollywood personalities are so vulnerable because everyone knows our faces. Most of them know our dresses, shoes, bags, homes, whereabouts… so we become vulnerable to such crazy hounding in the kind of climate of India where it seems there is no accountability for any kind of a heinous crime,” she added.

It’s valid to ask people to speak up about violence happening around the world, including instances of sexual abuse during times of conflict. However, this is how trolls react when women speak about their personal experiences of feeling unsafe in India.

When actors like Chadha and Simi Garewal tweeted in solidarity with Rafah, their comment sections looked about the same (Keep in mind these are some of the ‘nicer’ responses). Nicer, of course, here stands for ‘not violently misogynist and bigoted’.

(Photo Courtesy: X)

If people truly cared about gendered violence, they also wouldn’t resort to misogynistic hate when someone disagreed with them or (again) refuse to the address the actual problem. In instances like this, whataboutery shifts to asking, “What about XYZ country? That isn’t safe either.”

When actor Priyamani expressed concern over women’s safety after the Jisha case in 2018, she was trolled for ‘blaming India’. The actor had later expressed, “To everyone who's replying to my tweets...I request u to READ my tweets properly. I have never spoken against our country!"

When Deepika Padukone attended a protest at JNU, she was met with the same ‘toolkit gang’ rhetoric. Apparently, ‘selective activism’ is only so when you ‘select’ what trolls don’t agree with.

Both Swara Bhaskar and Deepika Padukone faced calls to boycott their immediate releases Veere Di Wedding and Chhapaak, respectively.

Fake News is Making the Trolling Worse?

The voracity and aggression with which this rhetoric is peddled would have you believe that there's ample proof to go around.

As you continue to scroll through social media, you will also come across a lot of misinformation and fake information. To give you a small preview, one comments I frequently came across claims that ‘Palestine voted against India in the UN’.

A simple Google search would tell you that Palestine has been a non-member observer state of the United Nations Assembly since November 2012. Even with the recent UN General Assembly vote that grants new ‘rights and privileges’ to Palestine, that status remains unchained. To quote the Associated Press verbatim, Palestine still doesn’t have the “right to vote in the General Assembly or any of its conferences”.

Ironically, a lot of trolls’ comments ask the original posters to read up on the history and ‘check facts’.

(Photo Courtesy: X)

All of this – the trolling, the intimidation, the misinformation, and whataboutery – cannot exist in good faith, even for the causes they claim to advocate for.

At least 600 were reportedly killed in Israel while more than 300 died in Gaza after Palestinian Islamist group Hamas launched a surprise attack against Tel Aviv on 7 October. Since the start of the war, according to the Gaza ministry, 36,050 Palestinians have been killed and more than 81,000 have been injured.

Humanitarian groups have condemned both.

For anyone following the activism on social media, it’s very easy to see that the same people advocating for a ceasefire are the ones advocating against anti-Semitism. And the sheer amount misinformation circling around about the conflict is especially surprising in a country that was one of the first to recognise Palestinian statehood (back in 1998).

A counter-image has started making the rounds on social media asking, ‘Where were your eyes on October 7?’ This (another) AI-generated image again pushes the idea that you can’t advocate for two things at the same time; that your empathy for one must come from apathy for another.

How has a call for solidarity turned into an excuse for whataboutery and trolling people who speak up in support? Even if you’ve had the privilege to only now see the images coming out of Rafah, how isn’t it enough to incite empathy?

As I continue to helplessly scroll through social media, a phrase my professor would always say comes to mind: ‘Think, it’s not illegal’.