BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

RANA AYYUB:

Targeted online violenceat the intersection of
misogyny and Islamophobia
BIG DATA CASE ST UDY//AUTHORS

Julie Posetti, Kalina Bontcheva,
Hanan Zaffar, Nabeelah Shabbir,
Diana Maynard, and Mugdha Pandya

﻿BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

Authors
ICFJ: Dr. Julie Posetti, Hanan Zaffar, and Nabeelah Shabbir
UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD: Prof. Kalina Bontcheva, Dr. Diana Maynard, Mugdha Pandya
COPY EDITOR: Kate Kingsford
COVER IMAGE: Dominik Osvald
DESIGNER: Luiza Maximo
We thank Mark Greenwood, Mehmet Bakir, and Muneerah Patel from the University of Sheffield, who
implemented the software used for this research.

CONTENT WARNING: This report includes graphic content that illustrates the severity of online
violence against women, including references to sexual violence and gendered profanities. This
content is not included gratuitously. It is essential to enable the analysis of the types, methods andpatterns of attacks against Rana Ayyub.

DISCLAIMER: Funding for research underpinning this case study was received from the UK
Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) as part of a broader project investigating
the development of an Online Violence Early Warning System. However, the research represents
the independent work and expertise of the researchers, and the views and opinions expressed arethose of the authors. It does not represent the policy or views of the organization providing funding

NOTE: Research underpinning this case study was conducted as part of a broader project investigating
the development of an Online Violence Early Warning System.
This report is published in partnership with the Story Killers project coordinated by Forbidden
Stories. The investigative journalism collaboration involves more than 100 journalists from 30
international media organizations.

COPYRIGHT: CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION-NON COMMERCIAL-SHARE ALIKE 4.0 INTERNATIONAL(CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 14, 2023

2

1INTRODUCTION
1.introduction“I am not only
being attacked for
my journalism. I’mbeing attacked for

my faith. So if you
are attacking me formy faith, I defend

myself as a Muslim
journalist.”
Rana Ayyub

Woman. Muslim. Investigative journalist.
Anti establishment commentator.
Washington Post columnist Rana Ayyub is one ofIndia’s most prominent and globally recognizedjournalists. She is also an emblematic case of online
violence against women journalists in the region.
The award-winning independent journalist has faced
virtually unrelenting online threats, harassment andabuse for over a decade. She is called “Jihadi Jane”,
an “ISIS sex slave”, a “presstitute” and Twitter mobs
have called for her to be gang-raped. “The hate started sometime around 2010…when I got Amit Shah1arrested…”, she told us, referring to her high impact
undercover investigation2 into India’s Gujarat Riots,
which left nearly 800 Muslims dead and thousands
homeless in 2002, and in which India’s current Prime
Minister Narendra Modi and his associates were
implicated.
Today, an army of trolls evidently aligned with theruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) threaten Ayyub at scale; on a daily basis. Whileshe has been badly harassed on Facebook andInstagram, the online violence she experiences islargely facilitated by Twitter, where she has over 1.5
million followers. The abuse routinely feature threatsof death and rape. They are disinformation-laced, andthey display characteristics of orchestration. They arealso deeply misogynistic and redolent of religious
bigotry. And they radiate to her family members.
1 Amit Shah is now India’s Home Minister, the second most important man in India,
and a close advisor of Prime Minister Modi, then the state of Gujarat’s chief minister.
2 Ayyub’s 2010 investigation into the 2002 Gujarat Riots and subsequent extrajudicial killings in the state was originally published by Tehelka Magazine and later
self-published as the book Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover-Up.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

Since mid 2021, Ayyub has also been charged with a slew of offenses by Indian authorities, ranging from criminal defamation (connected to an article published in 2009),‘criminal conspiracy’ (for sharing a tweet), and fraud (associated with her COVID-19
relief work). International human rights experts have described this pattern as “judicial harassment” in retaliation for her journalism and social media commentary.
There is a symbiotic relationship between online violence against journalists suchas Ayyub and political repression. The former chills press freedom, and creates amore permissive environment for the latter. In India, Prime Minister Modi himself has
been criticized for using his own Twitter account to incite or glorify violence, andmaintaining ties with social media accounts involved in the harassment and abuse ofjournalists and human rights advocates.
This ‘Big Data Case Study’3 examines the prolific campaign of online violence against
Rana Ayyub on Twitter. Adopting a novel mixed method approach applied to an ongoingseries of big data case studies involving emblematic targets of gendered online violence,it blends computational linguistics and network analysis of nearly 13 million tweets(collected between December 2019 and March 2022) with qualitative contextual fieldresearch, including long form interviews4 with the research subject, her former editor
at the Washington Post, and civil society experts. It aims to provide a solid evidencebase to assess the online violence against Ayyub, synthesizing her self-reported lived
experience with hard data.

1.1 The real threat of offline violence
Ayyub has suffered significant psychological trauma as a result of the online violence
she experiences, but there is also a major risk of the online threats and harassment
morphing into physical violence in one of the world’s deadliest countries to practicejournalism. In fact, the online violence Ayyub endures is so dangerous that United
Nations Special Rapporteurs have intervened three times in her case, with five of themissuing a warning in 2018 that her life was at “serious risk” as a result of the targetedharassment and abuse she had experienced.
The first major abuse spike in abuse against Ayyub, according to her experience,
followed her undercover investigation into the anti-Muslim 2002 riots in thewestern Indian state of Gujarat that was then led by the current Indian Prime
Minister Narendra Modi. Ayyub investigated the state government’s involvement
through undercover reporting, meeting numerous high-level officials (including
Modi himself) for her 2010 magazine cover story about Amit Shah, India’s current
Home Minister. Soon after, Shah was arrested. Meanwhile, Modi was accused ofsiding with the perpetrators. In 2023 the BBC reported that UK officials held Modi
“directly responsible”, although he continues to reject the allegations.
FIGURE 1: Ayyub’s Tehelka cover story which contributed to the arrest of BJP politician
Amit Shah two weeks after publication in 2010.

3 The case study was produced as part of a research project funded by the UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) which is working towards
development of an Online Violence Early Warning System. The research methods underpinning the study were pioneered by Julie Posetti, Diana Maynard and Kalina Bontcheva for
a 2021 research report for ICFJ on the online violence experienced by Maria Ressa as part of a broader UNESCO-commissioned study.
4 All quotes featured are from original interviews conducted by the researchers unless otherwise indicated.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

Murdered Indian journalist Gauri Lankesh was a friend of Ayyub’s who suffered online
violence before her assassination and translated Ayyub’s incendiary book on the Gujarat
Riots into a regional Indian language just before she was murdered in September,2017. The UN Special Rapporteurs, press freedom organizations and researchers havepointed to links between Ayyub’s case and the assassinated Indian journalist. The day
Lankesh was killed, she had messaged Ayyub to tell her not to worry too much about
the online violence she was experiencing.

FIGURE 2: Ayyub posts on Facebook about the murder of her friend Gauri Lankesh, whom she
said had told her earlier that day to dismiss the trolls attacking her.

The online violence targeting Ayyub in connection with her investigation into the
Gujarat Riots, the extrajudicial killings that followed, and Amit Shah’s subsequent arrest
was still proliferating as late as 2017. In November that year, in response to a Facebook
post in which she proudly shared a picture of her 2010 cover story, there was a barrageof abuse in reply. Including thinly veiled death threats, like this:FIGURE 3: A public post on Ayyub’s professional Facebook page from 12 November
2017 including a subtle death threat is still visible in 2023.5

Ayyub also told us that burned copies of her book on the Gujarat Riots
were posted to her in the midst of one of the most serious online attacks
against her in 2018.
A 2020 report from the Free Speech Collective of journalists, lawyers and activists
found that 200 Indian journalists were physically beaten while 67 were arrested thatyear. Prominent freelance journalist Neha Dixit said it was “imperative that we start
paying attention to violence beyond the online world”, after revealing that she and herpartner had been stalked for months, threatened with rape, acid attacks and murder,
and that she had foiled a break-in attempt at her home.
Ayyub herself links the online violence she experiences to offline threats, including
physical stalking. “I know for a fact that there are people who are following me… I’ve
seen them… They are using propaganda websites and social media to also target myfamily members.”
In recognition of the “harassment and misinformation reported against her,’’ Ayyub
was named as one of the world’s 10 most urgent cases of a journalist under attack by
the One Free Press Coalition6 in July 2021, December 2021 and March 2022.7

5 In line with academic research ethics protocols, we have obscured the identities of social media users featured in this report, unless they are public figures.
6 The One Press Coalition is a collective of more than 30 media organizations, created during an International Media Council meeting at the World Economic Forum in 2019. The
recognition of Ayyub’s danger came after police in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh filed a criminal complaint against Ayyub, digital media The Wire, and two other journalists.
7 Freedom House and the One Free Coalition recognized the abuse spike against Ayyub after she “tweeted her criticism of Saudi Arabia’s government role in the ongoing Yemen
war, receiving over 26,000 tweets in response, including rape and death threats”. See Ghada Oueisscase study for the similar online abuse she has faced for publishing on Yemen.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

1.2 The link between gendered
online violence and ‘lawfare’
The now globally recognizable playbook maneuver of authoritarian States and politicalfigures weaponizing the law against women journalists alongside targeted online violence
campaigns is also practiced in Ayyub’s case. For example, there are particular parallels
between the methods of attack used against Ayyub and the enabling environment for
her legal harassment, and the tactics deployed by the Philippine government against
Nobel Peace Prize-winning Filipino-American journalist Maria Ressa.8
Ayyub was first charged in June 2021 with ‘criminal conspiracy’ after sharing a video
on Twitter depicting the assault of an elderly Muslim man. Next, in February 2022,
she was charged under India’s money laundering and tax fraud laws for allegedly
keeping money she had fundraised for Indian communities affected by COVID-19. In
the aftermath, she was briefly detained and barred from boarding a flight from Mumbai
to the UK to speak at international events connected to this study. Most recently, in
December 2022, Ayyub was formally charged with criminal defamation in connection
with a 2009 magazine article. She vehemently denies all of these charges.

1.3 Intersecting triggers
Ayyub’s constant and fierce critique of the ideology, principles, and actions of HIndu
nationalism and the BJP - which enjoys an overwhelming majority in India - triggers
viral smear campaigns against her. These pile-ons targeting Ayyub are encouraged
by political actors and other public figures,9 along with law enforcement. She directly
attributes the attacks she experiences to the BJP and its supporters, based on the
biographies of the Twitter accounts that attack her, which frequently include those
self-identifying as Hindu nationalists.
But while the main trigger for the online violence directed at Ayyub may be her criticalreporting and commentary, she is targeted at a deeply personal level, at the intersectionof multiple points of discrimination, with what she terms her “religious and gender
identities”. As she points out, smear campaigns are designed to raise questions about
the character of the target. “What if she’s promiscuous? What if she takes money?
What if she cheats? What if she evades taxes? So, there will be some people who will
start believing that.” But this campaign of undermining Ayyub at a personal level is notjust designed to weaken her psychologically and elevate the physical risks she faces,
it is also ultimately designed to undercut public trust in her journalism.
Her role as an internationally-published commentator on India’s communal violence
and its democratic decline makes Ayyub a particular target. She is a columnist at the
Global Opinions desk at the Washington Post, she writes a popular newsletter on the
US-based subscription platform Substack, and she is frequently invited to speak at
conferences and fora abroad. As a result, she is accused of being “anti-national” and8 Ressa was the subject of the first Big Data Case Study on a woman journalist facing significant online violence published by ICFJ in partnership with the University of Sheffieldin 2021.
9 “This woman is SEPTIC”, BJP politician and popular actor Paresh Rawal tweeted at Ayyub in 2019 (the politician has previously targeted writers and journalists). In anotherexample from 2021, Ayyub tweeted about her father. Subsequent online abuse about him was escalated by Prem Shukla, a national spokesperson of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s
BJP, who quote tweeted the abuse, condemning it for having “ripped him apart”. Ayyub tweeted that the spokesperson “endorses a fake twitter account that abuses & slanders myfather. The twitter account he quotes is allegedly a right wing troll that has used a fake display picture. If this is not harassment by the state, what is?”’6

1.introduction

BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

of “defaming” India on the world stage. But Ayyub said she looks to “solidarity from theWestern media and international pressure” because “this government has unleashedcentral [law-enforcement] agencies against me and central agencies don’t care aboutstate powers. They can come and arrest me irrespective.”
Twitter is the main vector for the online violence that Ayyub experiences and theplatform has utterly failed to protect the journalist where she most frequently shares
her reporting and commentary. But while allowing her abusers to proliferate and act
with impunity, Twitter has simultaneously censored tweets from Ayyub at the behestof the Indian government.

15 KEY FINDINGS
1. 62% of all obvious abuse directed at Ayyub contained in our Twitter

dataset is classed as personal attacks (including sexist, misogynistic,
sexually explicit and racist abuse).

2. 24% of all abuse in our dataset is classified as sexist, misogynistic

or sexually explicit and the most prominent abusive hashtag was
the vile portmanteau #presstitutes.

3. Nearly 35% of all abuse studied was identified as credibility-relatedi.e., reputational attacks designed to undermine Ayyub’s journalism
and undercut her commentary.

4. Over 29% of the abuse directed at Ayyub in association with theprevalent abusive term ‘presstitute’ can be categorized as religious
bigotry, demonstrating the ways in which the online violence she
experiences operates at the intersection of Islamophobia andmisogyny.

5. Ayyub regularly receives open rape and death threats, Islamophobic

abuse, and character assassination from accounts which do noteven bother to conceal the identities of the users behind them,demonstrating the impunity with which they operate.

6. Disinformation - especially gendered disinformation - is a major
feature of online attacks on Ayyub - from imposter tweets putting
false words into her mouth to deep fake porn videos.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

7. Nearly 42% of Ayyub’s tweets attracted at least one abusive reply,
which represents an exceptionally high rate of abuse.

8. The top three abuse spikes in our dataset reflect large-scale attacks

on Ayyub associated with her reporting and commentary in 2020,
at the height of the pandemic.

9. Abuse against Ayyub comes at a very high speed, sometimes within
seconds of her posting a tweet, and there can be a visible spike inabusive replies within one to two minutes of a post. This pattern ishighly unusual and it could signal coordinated campaigns of abuse.

10. Abusive memes and image-based abuse which frequently fly under

the radar of detection are a marked feature of the abuse against
Ayyub.

11. The online violence against Ayyub is largely instigated and fuelledby Twitter users aligned with Hindu nationalism and India’s ruling
BJP party.

12. Twitter-based threats and abuse are a feature of the enabling

environment for Ayyub’s offline legal harassment by the Indianauthorities.

13. Lightning rods for attacks include: Ayyub’s investigative reporting,her commentary in the international news media, world stage
speaking engagements, and international accolades.

14. Twitter is the main vector of online violence against Ayyub andhas failed to respond to the abuse. While the platform has allowed
her attackers to proliferate virtually unchecked and abuse herwith impunity, it recently acceded to a demand from the Indian
government to censor Ayyub’s tweets.

15. India’s highly partisan TV networks, propagandistic blogs, andcaptured mainstream news outlets amplify and reinforce the genderbased and Islamophobic online abuse that Ayyub experiences.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

Timeline of online
violence escalation
against Rana Ayyub:

2010-2023

The timeline below, mapping the evolution of online violence (including
escalation to offline harm) against Rana Ayyub, is followed by a detailed
analysis of trends, themes, threats, tropes and networks associated withthe abuse, harassment and threats that she experiences on Twitter.

2002
The ‘Gujarat riots’ result in the deaths of about 1,000 people, most of themMuslims, when the current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was theChief Minister of the state of Gujarat. The militants were aligned with the
Hindu nationalist movement, which underpins Modi’s BJP.

2010
Rana Ayyub, then aged 26, reports an eight-month undercoverinvestigation for investigative English-language magazine Tehelka, linking
current Indian Home Minister (and close advisor of Modi, then Gujarat’s
chief minister) Amit Shah to extrajudicial killings, which contributes tohis arrest two weeks later. According to Ayyub, “If the number of tweets
generated against me before 2010 were around 50, the numbers had
spiraled to a few hundred after”.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

2011
Ayyub opens her current Twitter account.

2012
2014

Following another investigative report on Amit Shah’s involvement in
extra-judicial killings, Ayyub is rumored to be seen with an official fromthe nation’s Central Investigation Agency, in a “salacious” video. The
hashtag #ranaayyubcd trends on Twitter, referring to the unprovenexistence of a sexually compromising CD-Rom purportedly featuring
Ayyub. The insinuation was clearly designed to discredit her characterand her journalism.

•

Narendra Modi comes to power, marking the end of Prime Ministerialpress conferences in India and the beginning of a period of seriouspress freedom decline.

•

Ayyub becomes an independent freelance journalist.

March-May 2016
Ayyub accepts help from friends, melts down her own gold - her family’s
intended dowry for her - to fund and self-publish the full investigation
about the 2002 riots, Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover-Up. According to
Ayyub, this represents one of the peaks of the online abuse against her.

April 2017•

The Hindi edition of Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover-Up is published.

•

In a 2017 Facebook post,10 a police officer accused an unnamed
journalist of ‘honey-trapping’ police officers, but a news channel
picked up on the tweet and named Ayyub as the journalist inquestion.

10 The Facebook post by Sanjiv Bhatt reads: “The lawyer activist fell easy prey to the charms of the dusky chain smoking journalist and was more than happy to share juicy casedetails with her… The journalist wanted more… The younger of the two IPS officers was attracted to the journalist and she was attracted to him… little did the two lovers know atthat time that the Government Guest Houses where they used to meet for their amorous peccadilloes were discreetly bugged by the operatives of the State Police”.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

A 2014 tweet11 in which Ayyub quotes and dismisses an abusive
tweet about Hindu nationalism directed towards her resurfaces andis misrepresented by trolls. Ayyub is accused of indecent behavior
and bombarded with religious slurs and demeaning abuse.

September 2017
Fellow journalist and Ayyub’s friend Gauri Lankesh, who had translated
Ayyub’s book into regional Indian language Kannada, is assassinatedwith impunity after investigating disinformation networks and speaking
out about the rise of right-wing Hindu extremism. Ayyub said Lankesh
had that morning consoled Ayyub about her online abuse in a Facebook
post in which she also downplayed the threat played by online trolls.

April 2018•

A tweet from a fake account purporting to belong to the news
channel Republic TV12 (founded in 2017 and a favorite of Modi
supporters) claims that Ayyub views punishment against child rapists
as a tool to target Muslims. The fake tweet is amplified by rightwing influencers, including many government-aligned journalists.

•

Two days later, another fake tweet with a manipulated user bio
depicts Ayyub allegedly saying that she “despises India and Indians”;
this is amplified by well-known figures.

•

A malicious online violence campaign against Ayyub ensues,
including threats of murder and attempts to incite her gang rape.

•

A deep fake porn video with Ayyub’s face morphed onto the head ofan actor goes viral; Ayyub is first alerted that it is appearing via RSS
and WhatsApp online chat groups maintained by BJP supporters.
The video is widely distributed, including on the Facebook page of
Yogi Adityanath, chief minister of India’s largest state Uttar Pradesh.

•

Ayyub files a complaint with law enforcement over the video. She
told us: “​​I gave them at least 200 screenshots and links, and I gavethem specifically who they were, on whose fan pages the videos
were shared.”•

Ayyub is doxxed13 in a tweet with a screenshot of the deep fakevideo; she is subsequently targeted on WhatsApp.

•

Burnt copies of Ayyub’s book are posted to her home.

11 See Figure 16 for more details.
12 Other media organizations in this ecosystem include online media platform The Scoop Beats - two of whose journalists were convicted of spreading misinformation about
Ayyub - far-right-wing news channel Sudarshan News, and right-wing news portal OpIndia.
13 Doxxing is the process of retrieving, hacking and publishing other people’s personally identifiable information such as names, addresses, phone numbers and credit card
details in an environment that implies or encourages intimidation or threat.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

May 2018•

A Washington Post article about Ayyub’s online abuse again leads
to a spike in trolling against her.

•First intervention by UN special rapporteurs occurs in supportof Ayyub, following the mass circulation of disinformation-laced
attacks against her, including deep fakes.

December 2018
Ayyub’s first article as a Global Opinions writer for the Washington Postis published.

May 2019
Narendra Modi is re-elected Prime Minister of India in a landslide victory.

December 2019•

A new law called the Citizenship Amendment Act is passed by Modi’s
government, whereby non-Muslims from Pakistan, Afghanistan
and Bangladesh have the right to seek fast-tracked citizenship in
India. There are protests across the country, some with fatalities.

•

A profile on Ayyub is published in the New Yorker, leading to a spikein online violence - a trend seen again following a similar story
published in Time magazine in 2021.

January 2020•

An Information & Broadcasting Ministry of Pakistan tweet praising
Ayyub for “exposing the fascist agenda of Modi” leads to another
online pile-on visible in our Twitter dataset.

•

MAJOR ABUSE SPIKE IN OUR DATASET: Publication of an Ayyub
opinion piece in the Washington Post condemning Prime Minister
Modi’s “divisive agenda to polarize India on religious lines”,
amidst debate around the Citizenship Amendment Act, viewed
as discriminatory against Muslims.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

February 2020•

53 people are killed in north-east Delhi. 21 people, many of them
students who had protested the Citizenship Amendment Act for
its imposition of a religious test on those seeking citizenship, arecharged for alleged conspiracy to defame the Modi government.

•

On February 10, Ayyub responds to a tweet about the controversial
Act from the BJP Twitter handle in the state of Karnataka:

FIGURE 4: Ayyub shares a tweet by the BJP Karnataka Twitter handle, which
depicts women in hijabs holding up their papers and alleges that Muslim
women have said “We won’t show our papers!14

In response, Ayyub is accused of being a Muslim terrorist, with the@BJP4Karnataka account responding: “Miss Journalist: Issuingthreats is a norm in your Jihadi World, not in our Hindutva Bharat”.15

March 2020•

MAJOR ABUSE SPIKE IN OUR DATASET: Ayyub, critical of India’s
management of the COVID-19 crisis,16 tweets “What is left for a virus
to kill in a morally corrupt nation?” As a result, there is a dramatic
escalation in attacks against her on the platform.

•

Ayyub tweets about a story on a COVID-19 outbreak in a Muslim
congregation which met during lockdown and another abuse
spike ensues.

August 2020
MAJOR ABUSE SPIKE IN OUR DATASET: The Washington Post publishes
an opinion piece by Ayyub on the rise of Islamophobia and the spreadingof anti-Muslim propaganda in Modi’s India.

14 In February 2020, Ayyub quote tweets: “This is the “official handle of the ruling party of India with a direct threat to Muslims. Does the world need any more proof of Narendra
Modi’s agenda to reduce Muslims as second class citizens. So many of us have been accused of misplaced paranoia.”
15 “Hindutva” is described in a New York Times profile of slain Indian journalist Gauri Lankesh as a: “fundamentalist, majoritarian movement that seeks to codify and enforce
orthodox Hinduism and to define India as an explicitly Hindu country (despite the fact that India has the second-largest Muslim population in the world.” A 2019 New Yorker profile
featuring Ayyub said it is “the idea that India is first and foremost a nation for Hindus”. A 2022 Atlantic article writes “Hindutva, meaning “Hindu-ness,” has become shorthand for
Hindu nationalism itself.”
16 In May 2022 the BBC reported that the COVID-19 death toll in India could be “nearly 10 times higher than official records suggest”, according to World Health Organization(WHO) data: “India’s government has rejected the figure, saying the methodology is flawed”.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

May 2021
Charges of tax evasion loom, as tax authorities start an investigation
into her affairs. This followed accusations levelled against Ayyub by
far right pro-BJP website, OpIndia.

June 2021
Ayyub shares a video of an elderly Muslim man who was forced by a mob
to chant the Hindu nationalists’ rallying cry ‘Jai Sri Ram’ (Hail Lord Ram).
Along with writer Saba Naqvi, Mohammed Zubair, a founder of the Alt
news website, The Wire, and Twitter India, she is charged by the police
for criminal conspiracy for sharing the video. The act is condemned by
the Press Club of India and Reporters Without Borders, among others.
Death and rape threats follow.

August 2021
Ayyub’s bank accounts are frozen as part of the tax evasion investigation
until, under protest, she pays US $270,000 to the tax authorities. She
subsequently began legal action to challenge the tax authorities in court.

October 2021
UN experts17 intervene for a second time as the online threats against
Ayyub escalate again, writing a private letter to the Indian government
expressing concern about a “deliberate and sustained campaign ofharassment and intimidation”. They assert that this campaign appears
to be carried out by State and non-State actors in India as a direct
response to Ayyub “exercising her right to freedom of opinion andexpression online”.

November 2021•

Ayyub appears in a BBC interview for the programme HARDTalk,
where she describes the Muslim man as having been force-shavenand forced to chant a Hindu slogan “by a mob of Hindu vigilantes”.

17 Mandates of the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief; the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression;
the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders and the Special Rapporteur on minority issues.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

December 2021
Rana Ayyub tweets: “A week into my BBC Hard Talk interview and asummon by a central investigating agency. How very predictable :)”January 2022
Ayyub criticizes the Saudi government’s role in Yemen in a tweet. Her
name trends on Twitter - 26,000 mentions of her name are recorded
by Twitter, with multiple death and rape threats among the abuse
she experiences. She identifies right-wing Indian accounts and thosewith Saudi-identifying profiles as prime offenders. A doctored video
purporting to establish that Ayyub is aided by Pakistan and banned
from Saudi Arabia goes viral, exacerbating the pile-on.18
FIGURE 5: A tweet posted by Rana Ayyub on 24 January, 2022, highlighting her
name trending on Twitter and asserting that most of the mentions were abusive
and rape and death threats.

February 2022•

On 4 February 2022, India’s central government agency Enforcement
Directorate (ED) charges Ayyub for alleged fraud in connection with
her COVID-19 relief work and associated community fundraising
activities under sub-section (1) of section 5 of the Prevention of
Money Laundering Act, 2002 (15 of 2003), (PMLA), freezing her bankaccounts. Many, including UN experts and her US-based employer,link the charges to her critical reporting and commentary. On social
media, she is labeled a “thief” and a “fraud” as attacks increase,further sullying her reputation. Ayyub’s bank accounts are frozen
for the second time in six months.

•

During the same period, a fake tweet purporting to come from Israel
Defence Forces claiming Israel rejected Ayyub’s (non-existent)
application for citizenship was shared on Twitter. This followed Ayyub
tweeting in support of Palestine, following the US condemnation of
the attack on Ukraine by Russia. Accounts belonging to right-wing
Indians are seen commending Israel for it.

•

On 10 February, Mumbai police arrest a man in connection with death
threats sent to Ayyub via social media, following charges brought

18

A closer analysis of a subset of this abuse is discussed below.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

against six social media users in connection with death threats,sexual harassment, and identify theft. That same day, Ayyub tweets:“Mumbai cyber crime has made the first arrest in the rape anddeath threats issued to me. A young man has been arrested from
Bhopal for giving me death threats. Hugely impressed with thealacrity of @MumbaiPolice and @CPMumbaiPolice who hadpromised me justice without delay”.
•

In a BBC World News interview, Ayyub comments on the Indianhijab protests involving a Hindu mob surrounding a Muslim girlwearing a hijab in a college in Karnataka. She describes the boys
as “Hindu vigilantes, Hindu terrorists for that matter”.

•

The Hindu IT Cell, a far right BJP-aligned group filed a legal complaint
against Ayyub in reference to her appearance on the BBC WorldNews interview for: “labeling innocent Hindu students as terrorists…
The number of complaints will increase and we will teach her alesson through legal means”. Pictures of Ayyub in skirts and shortdresses are shared online to condemn her alleged “hypocrisy” overher position on the hijab.

March 2022•

On 5 March 2022, Ayyub tweets that two ‘journalists’, Vidyanshi
Krishkumar Trivedi and Ayush Chandramohan Srivastav from online
site The Scoop Beats, are arrested by Mumbai police for spreading
disinformation about Ayyub: “[they] had accused me of being aided
by Pakistan, announced that I had been banned by Saudi Arabia,
and attributed morphed anti-India tweets to me”.

•

On 29 March 2022, Ayyub is held by immigration officials at
Mumbai airport en route to London to speak at an event organizedby the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute(IBAHRI), Doughty Street Chambers and the International Center
for Journalists (ICFJ).19•

A full-page advertisement is taken out in the Washington Post in
partnership with the Coalition Against Online Violence, in supportof Ayyub:“Almost every day Rana Ayyub faces threats of violence anddeath. She has been the target of prejudiced investigations
and online harassment. Her bank account was frozen overcharitable work. Journalists should not fear prosecution
and smear campaigns”.

19

The organization commissioned to undertake this research

161.introduction

BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

April 2022•

Ayyub successfully appeals to the High Court to secure her rightto travel to Italy to deliver a keynote address20 at the International
Journalism Festival and on to the US to accept an industry
award. She is viciously trolled again after her speech in Italy, withdisinformation agents masquerading as news publishers fuellingthe blowback.

•Ayyub is awarded the Overseas Press Club of America Awardfor ‘best commentary in any medium on international news’. The
judges said:
At grave personal risk, Rana Ayyub of the Washington Post has
called out Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s systemic persecutionof the Muslim minority. As one juror noted, “Her stories are truly
frightening, and India’s slide into religious nationalism does not
get nearly enough attention”.

September 2022•

Ayyub joins the University of Chicago Institute of Politics as a2022 Pritzker fellow for three months.

•

Ayyub receives a Mumbai court summons for an article21 that
she wrote in 2009 about a hardline right-wing Hindu organization
linked with a terror attack in Goa. She explains that the allegation
against her cites her bias as a Muslim.

December 2022•

Ayyub is awarded the 2022 International John Aubuchon Press
Freedom award from the US National Press Club, previously won
by a slew of prominent press freedom defenders. In a talk withfellow Washington Post writer Jason Rezaian, she said: “When I
won the Aubuchon award, I had comments on my Instagram andTwitter asking how it felt ‘selling your country’.”•

On 22 December, 2022 US Senator Patrick Leahy publishes astatement in support of Rana Ayyub and freedom of the press,
tweeting: “Rana Ayyub and other brave journalists who risk theirlives to report on abuses of power and other matters of public
interest need our protection and support”.

20 This keynote address and interview were moderated by Julie Posetti, lead author of this case study.
21 The 2009 article in question is no longer available on the Tehelka webpage, but Ayyub has republished it via her newsletter.

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2.methodology•

BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

While in the US, Ayyub is alerted to a charge sheet having been
issued for criminal defamation in reference to the above-mentioned
article published in 2009.

January 2023•

Ayyub returns to India for hearings in two separate courts pertaining
to the money laundering charges.

•

Ayyub’s lawyer Vrinda Grover makes a connection between thelegal harassment and online violence in court, reading out certain
tweets of Hindu IT Cell members who thank the ED for registering
the complaint against Ayyub; one reads ‘send Rana Ayyub toGhaziabad jail, suffice for us’.

2.methodology

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2.methodology

BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

2METHODOLOGY
Twitter is the main vector for
online violence against Ayyub.
She has significant traction on the platform, and herabusers target her where she has most impact with digitalaudiences. Therefore, to determine the features, patterns
and trajectories of online violence towards Ayyub, we havestudied a very large Twitter dataset of nearly 13 million(12,979,519) tweets collected between 12 December 2019
and 1 March 2022.22 Adopting a novel mixed method
approach applied to an ongoing series of big data casestudies involving emblematic targets of gendered online
violence, we have triangulated this data with contextual
qualitative research, including in-depth interviews with
Ayyub, her editor and civil society experts.
On the quantitative side, we applied Natural Language
Processing (NLP) and network analysis techniques tothe dataset. After excluding tweets authored by Ayyub
and automatic retweets of her tweets by others, we moreclosely examined 8.7 million (12,979,519) tweets directedat Ayyub during the period. Of those, 647,619 are original
tweets authored by other users; over 3.5 million (3,629,516)
are replies to Ayyub posted by these accounts; and justover 4 million (4,473,511) are retweets relating to tweets
by the other users.

12,979,519
t wee ts
were analyzed

collected between

12 DECEMBER 2019 AND 1 MARCH 2022

22 We began collecting Twitter data focused on Rana Ayyub in the context of a global study against online violence against women journalists commissioned by UNESCO
in November 2019. The comprehensive final study from this project was published in
2022.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

More than 75% of the tweets collected are in English,23 13% in Hindi, and the remainder
in other languages. Among these are tweets in ‘Hinglish’, which blends English andHindi vocabulary or constructions, but Twitter doesn’t tag these as a separate language
category. The reach of Ayyub’s own tweets is very high, attracting just over 4 million(4,212,605) retweets by some of her 1.5 million followers.
The NLP tools deployed to examine the dataset include an English rule-based abuseclassifier developed to distinguish between abusive and non-abusive tweets, the targetof the abuse (whether it was aimed at the journalist in question or someone else), andvarious characteristics of the abuse (e.g. whether the abuse was political, racist, sexist,
sexually explicit, etc.). Abusive terms are only matched in the text when they occur in alinguistically relevant way (for example, not every instance of the word “die” is abusive,
but “You deserve to die” certainly is).
The NLP analysis is based on a ‘high accuracy detection’ model, and consequently the
samples of online abuse extracted using this method are considered to be severely
under-reported, capturing only around 50% of all English-language abusive messagespresent in the target’s social media stream, according to previous studies.24
So, it is important to note that a great deal of abuse therefore flies under the radarof this kind of automated detection, especially that represented in images, memes,
and GIFs, and/or requiring the context of additional information such as links andconversation threads. This is why our approach of synthesizing big data analysis withparallel qualitative analysis of original interviews and contextual research undertaken
in India is so necessary.
Next, we conducted network analysis on the prevalent abusive accounts to determineinterconnections and the distribution pattern of the abuse.
We conducted the qualitative field research in parallel with the quantitative research andsubsequently undertook a thematic analysis of the interview data before synthesizing
the qualitative and quantitative datasets. Once this data synthesis and analysis wascompleted, we were able to produce the timeline of systematic online violence against
Ayyub featured above, highlighting key escalation points.

23 According to Twitter’s language classification.
24 See also: G. Gorrell, M. Greenwood, I. Roberts, D. Maynard, K. Bontcheva. Twits, Twats and Twaddle: Trends in Online Abuse towards UK Politicians. In Proceedings of the 12th
International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2018), 25-28 June 2018, Stanford, US.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

3THE CONTEXT:
Online violence as a tool of repression
in a backsliding democracy
3. the context
Before analyzing our Twitter dataset, it isimportant to understand the context for the
prolific online violence against Rana Ayyub.
In this section, we identify the primary sociopolitical and cultural factors that inform the datainterpretation.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

3.1 Severe press freedom erosion
in Modi’s India
Narendra Modi’s right-wing Hindu nationalist administration attempts to stifle
independent journalism in India through censorship, shutdowns, imprisonment ofcritical journalists, and other restrictive measures, including spyware and surveillance.
India was ranked 150th out of 180 countries on Reporters Without Borders’ (RSF) 2022
World Press Freedom Index, despite simultaneously being regarded as the world’s
largest democracy. It has slipped eight places on the ladder since 2021.
RSF has blamed the hostile environment created by the government for the increased
online violence campaigns against journalists, and described India as one of the world’s
most dangerous countries for journalists: “The coordinated hate campaigns waged
on social networks against journalists who dare to speak or write about subjects thatannoy Hindutva followers are terrifying and include calls for the journalists concerned
to be murdered”.
Similarly, the US NGO Freedom House rated India only ‘partly free’ on the Global
Freedom Score25 in 2021, with the freedom and independence of the news media
scoring only two out of four. Freedom House observed that attacks on press freedom
have “escalated dramatically under the Modi government” and further noted that:“Authorities have used security, defamation, sedition, and hate speech laws, as wellas contempt-of-court charges, to quiet critical voices in the media. Hindu nationalist
campaigns aimed at discouraging forms of expression deemed ‘anti-national’ haveexacerbated self-censorship”.

A deadly place to practice journalism
Practicing journalism can be deadly in India. The country is ranked third after Mexicoand Afghanistan in 2021 according to UNESCO’s Observatory of Killed Journalists,
which counts 35 journalists killed in India since the ruling BJP came to power in 2014.
Five journalists were killed in the country in 2021, and journalists who report criticallyon Modi and his administration - as Ayyub frequently does - are often targeted for
retribution, just as Gauri Lankesh was. In fact, the UN Special Rapporteurs intervening
in Ayyub’s case in 2018 pointed to Lankesh’s murder as a signal of the risks posed to
Ayyub’s life as a result of the online violence she experiences.
Compounding these risks is India’s serious problem of impunity for crimes againstjournalists. For example, the Indian government has not provided a single responseto the UNESCO Director General’s request for information on a judicial follow-up in
any of the killings of journalists recorded.

25 Since 1972, US research institute Freedom House has produced a Freedom in the World Report annually that ranks countries based on their levels of democratic freedom,
political rights and civil liberties.    

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

3.2 Media capture: Nationalistic
news outlets as attack dogs
Online violence directed at critics of the Indian government and the country’s ruling party,
Rana Ayyub prominent among them, not only further imperils the safety of journalists
in India, it has had a significant chilling effect on critical reporting in the country.
As RSF noted in 2022, Indian news media have faced increasing pressure to toe thegovernment line since the overwhelming victory of Narendra Modi’s BJP in 2019. As aresult: “The pro-government media pump out a form of propaganda, journalists whodare to criticize the government are branded as ‘anti-state’, ‘anti-national’, or even ‘proterrorist’ by supporters of the ruling [BJP]”.
In addition to intimidation tactics, financial pressure has been deployed by the Indian
government to capture most of India’s mainstream media houses. This includes thewithholding of government advertising from critical media outlets, according to a reportfrom the Stimson think tank:

Many media outlets enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the government, inturn receiving attention, funding, and prominence. These trends damage
India’s democracy and also put journalists critical of the government in danger,
threatening their right to physical safety.
Indeed, the national mainstream Indian media is increasingly ‘nationalist’, and it tends toadopt the State position on religious minorities and amplify hate speech in campaigns
against critics of the government, such as Ayyub. Along with propagandistic websites,
they parrot and inflame the attacks on Ayyub, which frequently target her at theintersection of misogyny and Islamophobia.26
Sections of niche and independent Indian media houses and international news
organizations have continued to report critically on the government and attacks on
minorities, even in the face of enormous pressure.27 As a result, they are regularly
targeted and threatened by both the government and its large base of supporters
online. The government has cracked down on numerous Indian journalists by detaining,arresting, and intimidating them, while also pursuing independent news publishers
through the courts.

3.3 Mob violence and persecutionof minorities
Discrimination and prejudice against minorities, particularly Muslims, has beennormalized in India since Modi came to power in 2014. The country has also seen
open calls for genocide and mass murder fuelled by disinformation and hate speech
circulating on social media. Such online targeting of minorities has been linked to
26 Among answers on a Quora page (a US-based question-and-answer website) titled “Who is Rana Ayyub, and why does she keep abusing India and Indians?”, one targets
Ayyub for her childhood disability and religion: “Just a crippled Jihadi keyboard warrior ranting against Hindus and Modi for her polio and sex-deprived life.”
27   For example, following the revocation of Kashmir’s special status in August 2019, most of the national media did not report critically on the large-scale crackdown, whereas
the international news outlets with foreign correspondents on the ground in the region did hold the government up to scrutiny.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

several instances of mob lynching. For instance, in 2018 at least 19 people were killed
within two months in India, over a fake news story about child abductors that went
viral over WhatsApp.
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF)28 reported in 2021 that:

Government officials and nonstate actors continued to use social media andother forms of communication to harass and spread hatred and disinformation
against minority communities, including Muslims, Christians, and Dalits.
A prominent aspect of this intolerance has been attacks on critics by the ruling party andtheir supporters. Those speaking out against the policies or ideology of the BJP comeunder heavy attack. Rana Ayyub - a Muslim journalist whose reporting and commentary
focus on the persecution of religious minorities - is naturally a prime target. This fact
is underscored by the fact that the three biggest spikes in our data were triggered byposts in 2020 in which Ayyub discusses the implications of government policies forreligious minorities (see discussion in Section 5).

3.4 International reporting,xenophobia and the ‘defaming’of IndiaInternational news media continue to report critically on India from within the country
and offshore. This has led to international media houses being characterized andviewed as ‘anti-India’, while Rana Ayyub is accused of “defaming India” before a
global audience in response to her critique and commentary on the Hindu nationalist
government. Ayyub’s work as a columnist for the Washington Post therefore makes her
a bigger target for the Modi government and its supporters. “For them, it’s like ‘She’s
just getting a lot of international fame’,” she told us.
And while perpetrators of online violence against Ayyub are frequently identifiable asadherents of Hindu nationalism, she told us that her detractors also include ‘liberal’commentators who deem her anti-establishment stance to be ‘anti-national’ or ‘harmful’for India’s global reputation, for example when the UN has intervened on her behalf:

The so-called ‘secular liberal’ diplomats said, why did Rana have to take this on
the international level to spite India? And I’m like, hang on, I’m being humiliatedday in, day out. And if somebody else intervenes for my safety, you are sayingthat I am trying to spite India on an international level. So they made it about metrying to be unpatriotic about getting the UN into our affairs.
But Ayyub also highlighted how vital it was to her journalistic mission to draw international
attention to the escalating violence against religious minorities in India. Engagement

28 The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) is a US federal government agency that monitors the right to freedom of religion across the world
and provides policy recommendations to the US President and Congress.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

and solidarity with the international news media29 offers her a protective
shield as online attacks increase in parallel with legal harassment.
It serves as a caution to those seeking to restrict her reporting andmovement, helping to keep her safe, she said, pointing to a full page
advertisement in the Washington Post30 published as an act of support:

That’s kept me alive... they had made up theirmind to jail me. I am alive today and I’m able to
do my journalism only because of the interventionof international journalists. They would have justsilenced me because they knew the Indian media
had already thrown me under the bus.
​​​​FIGURE 6: A full-page print advert in the Washington Post, February 2022,
highlighting that their columnist Rana Ayyub faces daily threats of violence anddeath, and is a target of “prejudiced investigations” and online violence. It was
published in collaboration with the Coalition for Online Violence.31 Credit: Rana
Ayyub.

3.5 The authoritarian playbook
There is a gendered online violence playbook being followed by authoritarian regimes
which target women journalists as they curb press freedom as a means of suppressing
opposition and consolidating power. The characteristics of the attacks on Ayyub arevery similar to those deployed against other women journalists whose cases we’vestudied in detail, including Nobel laureate Maria Ressa and Al Jazeera’s Ghada Oueiss.
They are also very familiar to Elias Lopez who was, until recently, Senior Editor of Global
Opinions at the Washington Post, and Ayyub’s supervisor:32... campaigns of personal discrediting like we’re seeing with Rana, trying todiscredit the person challenging the government or institutions, or taking on
powerful interests... it is something that unfortunately is happening in many,
many different countries, but also, of course, with their own very unique local
characteristics.
Lopez said the Washington Post “needs to extend as much institutional support” aspossible to Ayyub and other freelance journalists on the newspaper’s roster working
around the globe in difficult conditions. “Those writers are part of the Washington
29 The Times of London, the New York Times, New Yorker, the Guardian and the Washington Post have, on numerous occasions, reported about the attacks, intimidation, andharassment Ayyub has faced.
30 See Figure 6: this advert was put out in Ayyub’s defense, accompanied by the hashtag #WeStandWithRana to galvanize international advocacy.
31 A group of 12 international civil society organizations signed the letter, including: ARTICLE 19, Coalition For Women in Journalism, Committee to Protect Journalists, Free Press
Unlimited, International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), International Press Institute (IPI), International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF), OnlineSOS, PEN America, Reporters Without
Borders, Rural Digital Youth Resiliency Project, Women’s Media Center (WMC).
32 Lopez left this position in January 2023, and is now senior editor at CBS News.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

Post. They have our institutional support, and their work meets the absolute standardsof everything we do in the Washington Post,” he said. This is all the more importantbecause one of Lopez’ former contributors - Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi - wasassassinated with impunity after sustained online threats.

3.6 The function of ‘lawfare’ in
Ayyub’s persecution
Rana Ayyub is facing multiple investigations and charges in a context of increasing legal
harassment of critical journalists in India. This ‘lawfare’ is layered with disinformationfuelled online attacks designed to reinforce the view that she is a ‘criminal’, or a ‘corrupt’
journalist, diminish her support base, and legitimize her prosecution.
When Ayyub criticized the Modi government for its “inept” handling of the second
wave of COVID-19, she was brutally trolled and sent rape threats. She told us that thesethreats reminded her of those received by Gauri Lankesh before she was murdered.
Disinformation metanarratives began to be seeded in conjunction with these attacks,along with suggestions that Ayyub misappropriated pandemic relief funds that she
raised through the Indian crowd-funding platform Ketto.
In May 2021, Ayyub faced an investigation by the tax authorities after right-wing pro-BJP
website OpIndia published alleged irregularities connected to her COVID-19 fundraising.
Ayyub, Twitter Inc, Twitter Communications India and other journalists and news
outlets33 were charged by police for inciting ‘communal unrest’, for reportedly sharing
and facilitating distribution of a video of an elderly Muslim rickshaw-driver being heckled
by young men and made to chant a Hindu nationalist slogan, ‘Jai Shri Ram’ (Hail Lord
Ram). Ayyub and the others accused were charged under Indian Penal Code sections
153 (wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot), 153A (promoting enmity
between groups on ground of religion, class etc.), 295A (Deliberate and malicious acts,
intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious
belief) and 120B (criminal conspiracy). A Bombay Court later provided anticipatory bailto Ayyub in connection with the charge which carries a potential jail term of five years.
By September 2021, Ayyub was being investigated by the Central Investigations Agency(India’s main police investigations agency) for alleged corruption and fraud connected
to her fundraising for communities badly affected by COVID-19 in three campaigns
in 2020 and 2021.34 As a result, Ayyub was bombarded on Twitter with hashtags like#ranaayyubchorhai in Hindi (#RanaAyyubIsThief).35 At this time, a hoax tweet saying
her passport had been rejected by Israel also went viral.
The targeted tax and foreign investment-related cases against Ayyub meant that formonths in 2021 and 2022 she was unable to access her bank accounts, resulting in
financial hardship. Charges connected to the cases include criminal breach of trust,cheating, and dishonestly inducing delivery of property, with one charge alone attracting
a prison sentence of up to seven years.

33
34
35

Journalist Mohammed Zubair, Congress leaders Dr Sama Mohammad, Salman Nizami, Masqoor Usmani and writer Saba Naqvi.
In a First Information Report (FIR) by the Ghaziabad police, the complainant accused Ayyub of illegally acquiring public money.
There are 9,257 tweets in our dataset containing this hashtag.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

In February 2022, the far-right Hindu IT Cell group - whose activities have been
amplified by BJP leaders - filed a police complaint of ‘hurting religious sentiments’36
against Ayyub. The complaint pertained to an interview she gave to BBC World News,in which she described a mob who attacked a hijab-wearing student in the state of
Karnataka as “Hindu terrorists”. The Cell tweeted that it had filed a legal complaint
against Ayyub in reference to her BBC appearance for “labeling innocent Hindu
students as terrorist… The number of complaints will increase and we will teach her
a lesson through legal means”.
At this time, pictures of Ayyub in skirts and short dresses were shared to condemn
her alleged “hypocrisy” over her position on the hijab, with a clear purpose, she says:

To make sure that the cops register a complaint against me, they started trending
me. They started trending and everybody started tagging the cops like, ‘OK,
we have filed a complaint, what are you doing? What are you doing about thiswoman? She’s a hatemonger’. So that’s a pressure tactic that they use.
The Hindu IT Cell was founded by Vikas Pandey and Ramesh Solanki, both of whom are
openly Hindu ultranationalists and supporters of Narendra Modi. It operates a Twitter
account by the same name which has been blatant in its attacks on government critics,
including Ayyub. A registered trust in India, the Cell uses its Twitter account to openly
target politicians, journalists, and social activists who criticize Hindu nationalism andthe BJP.
On 4 March, 2022, it was reported that the police in Karnataka had brought a caseagainst Ayyub in connection with the Hindu IT Cell complaint regarding Ayyub’s BBC
interview. The offense is punishable by up to three years in jail.
Later in March, Ayyub was prevented from taking a flight37 to London at the Mumbai
Airport by the Enforcement Directorate (ED)38 for her alleged role in the above-mentioned
money laundering case. The ED, which is a central government agency responsible forhandling economic offenses, had earlier summoned Ayyub for questioning. Despite theevents which she was going to attend being public knowledge, Ayyub was restrained
from traveling at the last moment as she tried to cross the border.39 She was en routeto London to speak on a high level panel at an event co-sponsored by the International
Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI), Doughty Street Chambers and theInternational Center for Journalists (ICFJ).
UN experts called for an end to the “judicial harassment” of Ayyub and referred to theallegations as “bogus”, saying that they could be traced back to a far right social media
entity. Dozens of international civil society organizations also interpreted this conduct
as State persecution in retaliation for Ayyub’s critical reporting and commentary.
In September 2022, while undertaking a fellowship at the University of Chicago, Ayyub
received a summons from a Mumbai court for an article that she wrote in 2009 about
36 This is quite a sweeping, broad charge which can be brought under different sections of the Indian Penal Code by individuals. For example, in early 2021 a young comedianwas charged for videos he had made on social media, alleged jokes about Hindus. He was charged under sections 153A (“promoting enmity between different groups on groundof religion”) and 295A (“deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion”) and Sections 65 and 66 of the Information
Technology Act, 2008.
37 Seven months after Ayyub was stopped at the airport, Kashmiri photojournalist Sanna Irshad Mattoo was similarly not allowed to leave India in October 2022 - in her case, toreceive a Pulitzer Prize.
38 ED is a “financial fraud investigative body housed in the ministry of finance”.
39 Ayyub was on her way to London to speak about online violence against women journalists in India, followed by an address at the Perugia International Journalism Festival in
Italy on Indian democracy. She was also supposed to receive an award, and address The Guardian newsroom.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

a hardline Hindu organization linked with a terror attack in Goa.40 She tweeted thatthe allegation against her cites her bias as a Muslim. Ayyub said she was alerted to acharge sheet having been issued against her for criminal defamation in December thesame year - an offense which attracts a jail sentence of up to two years.
All cases and charges against Ayyub were ongoing at the time of writing in February 2023.

Some progress: Arrests of Ayyub’s online attackers
India lacks constructive and comprehensive implementation of laws against online
violence and hate. However, in February 2022, Mumbai Police made the first online
abuse-related arrest of a man who used Instagram to threaten to rape and kill Ayyub if
she continued her work as a journalist. Ayyub tweeted that she was “hugely impressed”
with Mumbai Police’s “alacrity”.41
The following month, two journalists from the website The Scoop Beats were arrested
for accusing Ayyub - on YouTube - of being “aided by Pakistan…banned by Saudi Arabia,
and [attributing] morphed anti-India tweets to me”. Ayyub tweeted that these were
“spreading the most vicious fake news” against her, “at the behest of” their employers.
“This is a big step in the direction of justice,” she said. She also said she was gratefulthat “the Mumbai Cyber Crime and its efficient team at BKC42 [Bandra-Kurla Complex
Cyber Police Station - ed] had earlier arrested two others in the case for sending me
and my family members explicit death and rape threats”.    

3.7 United Nations interventions
The prolific harassment and threats targeting Ayyub have attracted UN experts’ attention
and intervention since 2018. That year, following the mass circulation of gendered anddisinformation-laced attacks designed to shame Ayyub, heightening the risks she
faced offline and countering her critical writing, four UN experts called on the Indian
government to act to protect Ayyub, stating: “We are highly concerned that the lifeof Rana Ayyub is at serious risk following these graphic and disturbing threats.” They
warned of similarities between the attacks on Ayyub and online violence experienced
by her colleague and friend Gauri Lankesh prior to the journalist’s assassination in 2017.
In October 2021, when the threats against Ayyub escalated once more, the UN experts
intervened again, writing a private letter to the Indian government expressing concerns
about “what appears to be a deliberate and sustained campaign of harassment andintimidation of Ms. Rana Ayyub”. They asserted that this campaign appeared to be carriedout by State and non-state actors in India as a direct response to Ayyub “exercising
her right to freedom of opinion and expression online”. When the Indian government
failed to respond to this letter by the deadline set, the UN experts published their letter.
UN Special Rapporteurs publicly intervened again for Ayyub in February 2022, referring
to what they termed “judicial harassment” for her independent reporting. This appeal
mentioned that the “lack of condemnation and proper investigation by the Government,
40 The 2009 article in question is no longer available on the Tehelka webpage, but Ayyub has republished it via her newsletter.
41 Ayyub’s tweet from 31 January 2022: “Mumbai Police has registered an FIR against those who disseminated fake news, morphed tweets and death and rape threats against
me. About time these brazen and consolidated acts of online violence are stopped and the perpetrators brought to book.”
42 A Mumbai police page describes this as a “branch dealing with the investigation of website hacking, cyber stalking, cyber pornography, e-mail, credit card crime, softwarepiracy, on-line fraud and internet crime.”28

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

coupled with the legal harassment it has itself inflicted on Ms. Ayyub, has only served
to falsely legitimize the attacks and attackers and further endangered her safety”. They
also called on the Indian State to take action to protect Ms. Ayyub:

Relentless misogynistic and sectarian attacks online against journalist Rana
Ayyub must be promptly and thoroughly investigated by the Indian authorities
and the judicial harassment against her brought to an end at once... In response
to Ms. Ayyub’s efforts to shine a light on public interest issues and hold power toaccount through her reporting, she has been maliciously targeted withanonymous death and rape threats by organised groups online.
The UN experts have pointed out that the attacks are a result of Ayyub’s
reporting on issues affecting minority Muslim communities43 in India,
including the banning of hijabs in schools and colleges in Karnataka,along with her critique of the Narendra Modi government’s handlingof the COVID-19 pandemic. “The Government is not only failing in its
obligation to protect Ms. Ayyub as a journalist, but through its own
investigations of Ms. Ayyub, it is also contributing to and exacerbating
her perilous situation,” the 2022 statement further reads.
FIGURE 7: A tweet from UN Geneva on Twitter, emphasizing that the Indianauthorities needed to “thoroughly investigate” the “relentless misogynistic andsectarian attacks online” against Ayyub, and “end” the “judicial harassment”.

Any criticism of State-linked attacks on Ayyub from internationalorganizations is also viewed as an act of interference with Indiansovereignty: the Indian government called the allegations baseless, andasked the UN experts to be ‘objective’ in their assessment. Captured news
media characteristically shrieked about the UN Special Rapporteurs’2022 intervention, compounding the near instantaneous online hatedirected at Ayyub, the UN, and those expressing solidarity.
FIGURE 8: A meme featuring Bollywood actors from a popular film mocking the
UN Special Rapporteurs’ intervention in Ayyub’s case (“UN saving Rana Ayyub”)
whilst a war in Ukraine is going on (“Ukraine expecting UN to save”). This imagebased abuse was posted in reply to a February 2022 tweet from the UN Human
Rights Council on Twitter.

43

India has a population of approximately 200 million Muslims, about 14% of the population.

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4

DETAILED ANALYSISOF OUR TWITTER DATASET

4. Detailed analysis of our Twitter dataset
After using Natural Language Processing (NLP)
tools to examine the 8.7 million tweets directed at
Rana Ayyub in our dataset, we identified a subsetof nearly 45 thousand (44,467) ‘clearly abusive’
tweets targeting Ayyub in English and ‘Hinglish’ andisolated that data for detailed analysis. As discussed
in Section 2, we estimate that this automated process
misses at least 50% of the abuse leveled at Ayyub
in the dataset because the tools, tuned for highaccuracy, mainly identify those messages which are
explicitly abusive and where the target of the abuse
is clear.44 Additional limitations apply to analysis in
Hindi language tweets.

44

See detailed methodology discussion in Section 2.

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4.1 High speed and acutely
targeted abuse
63% (27,788) of the clearly abusive tweets targeting Ayyub were replies to her tweets;
878 were original abusive tweets mentioning Ayyub; 6,485 are abusive replies to othertweets; and 9,318 (20.9%) are retweets of some of the abusive tweets. The large numberof retweets that the abusive tweets attracted highlights the significant amplificationof abuse towards Ayyub, which thus dramatically increases the negative effects of theonline violence she experiences, and heightens the associated offline safety threats.
To put these figures in context, of the 8,232 tweets posted by Ayyub which received atleast one reply, 3,390 (41.1% of the 8,232 tweets) of them attracted at least one abusive
reply.45 This percentage of 41.1% is exceptionally high, underscoring the scale andfrequency of attacks on Ayyub mounted in response to her tweets.
The speed with which the abuse flies in is also highly unusual and noteworthy. According
to our analysis, the abuse directed at Ayyub on Twitter was frequently triggered by hercommentary and reporting. But all Ayyub has to do is “open her mouth” on Twitter toattract abuse. Our data analysis demonstrates that Ayyub starts receiving abuse within
14 seconds of posting a tweet, and there is a spike in abusive replies within one to two
minutes of an Ayyub tweet. She once experimented with this process by tweeting justa full stop, which sparked dozens of abusive replies, she told researchers.
The instances of abuse found in the subset of clearly abusive tweets are categorized
into three main types: attacks on professional credibility, personal attacks, and beliefbased attacks,46 as depicted in Figure 9 and discussed in detail below.

4.2 Key abuse spikes
The waves of abuse that follow Ayyub are mostly linked to her critical reporting andcommentary on communal violence, human rights abuses and politics in India. Her
Washington Post bio page states that key topics include “religious violence, extrajudicial
killings by the state and insurgency”.
The three main online violence spikes evident in our dataset all occurred in 2020, andthey all coincided with reporting and commentary by Ayyub about the implications ofModi government policies for religious minorities.

45 The 3,390 are the number of tweets that received at least one abusive reply, not just one reply.
46 Note that in our previous research applying the classifiers to the cases of Maria Ressa and Carole Cadwalladr, we did not distinguish a category of “belief-based attacks”
specifically. We have added this category in this case study specifically because religious attacks play a more prominent role here and are often intertwined with gendered andpolitically-based attacks.

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FIGURE 9: Distribution of abusive tweets between 12 December 2019, 06:07:00 and 1 March
2022, 00:00:00.

•••

January 2020: Ayyub’s opinion piece in the Washington Post condemns
Prime Minister Modi’s “divisive agenda to polarize India on religiouslines”, amidst debate around the Citizenship Amendment Act, viewed as
discriminatory towards Muslims.
April 2020: Another abuse spike occurs when Ayyub tweets about anarticle reporting a COVID-19 outbreak in a Muslim congregation which
met during lockdown: “While the world is fighting a pandemic, ourgovernment continues to vilify Muslims and amplify hate against them”.
August 2020: Opinion piece by Ayyub in the Washington Post discussing
the rise of Islamophobia and the spreading of anti-Muslim propaganda in
Modi’s India. She tweeted about it, and in the article she talked about her“extensive” reporting on the “rise of majoritarianism and Islamophobia in
Modi’s India”:“It has been exacting on the mind and soul to repeat myself in every column,
warning the world of the depravity of the regime and the immorality of a
populace that has normalized the naked hatred being disseminated in the
country, particularly during a devastating pandemic”.

4.3 Categorizing the abuse:dominant themes and tropes
Ayyub’s reporting on the rising tide of Islamophobia in India and her sharp critiqueof the Modi government are almost without exception countered by Twitter mobs
demonstrating far right and Hindu Nationalist tendencies. In response to her often highly
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journalism and commentary, she is frequently accused of lying, spreading ‘fake news’,
being stupid, being a fraudster, a ‘jihadi’ or a ‘terrorist’ and “instigating communal riots”.
The primary topics associated with the most frequently occurring abusive terms are
related to Muslims, Islam, Pakistan, India, and religion more generally. This is supported
by an analysis of the abuse types we see in the clearly abusive tweets.
The predominant category of abuse towards Ayyub on Twitter was ‘personal attacks’,which constituted 62.05% of all abuse. Attacks on Ayyub’s credibility are also prominent,
accounting for 34.80% of all abuse, with gender-based abuse targeting her credibility
constituting 3.86% of all abuse. Homophobic, racist (3.32% of all abuse), and religionbased abuse (2.15% of the total) are also clearly identifiable.

62% of all abuse is classed as
personal attacks, which include:•••

Sexist, misogynistic, and explicit abuse(24% of the total abuse encountered)
Racist abuse (3.32% of the total abuseencountered)
Other general insults aimed at Ayyub(34.54% of the total abuse encountered)

34.8% of all abuse was identified

as credibility-related (i.e. attacks on
professional reputation), which include:•

Gender-based attacks on credibility (3.86%of the total abuse)

3.15% of all abuse is classified
as belief-based, which include:••

FIGURE 10: Visualization of thecategorization of abuse types.

Religious abuse (2.15% of the total abuse)
Political abuse (1% of the total)

Now, we will further divide the abuse types into sub-categories for more detailed analysis.

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4.4. ‘Presstitutes’, explicit deep
fakes, and misogynistic online
auctions
Rana Ayyub is daily subjected to a barrage of misogynistic and sexist abuse. As outlined
above, sexist, misogynistic, and sexually explicit personal attacks represent 24% of allabuse, while gender-based attacks on credibility account for a further 3.86% of all abuse.

FIGURE 11: Concrete examples of the top 20 abusive phrases against Ayyub in all abusive tweets,ordered by frequency and colored according to the sub-category of abuse they belong to.

Looking at the abusive tweets, and replies containing abuse, the most prevalentabuse hashtag hurled at Rana Ayyub is the misogynistic portmanteau #presstitutes,
which originated in India in 2014 and is designed to discredit women journalists bothprofessionally and personally. Other prominent hashtags are #pkmkb and #harami_kaum,
attacking Ayyub’s religious background (see discussion in Section 4.6).

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FIGURE 12: Word clouds of top 25 hashtags seen in abusive tweets in our dataset highlightthe prevalence of misogynistic abuse against Ayyub, including the highly offensive portmanteau#Presstitutes.
This pernicious slur is also used and amplified by high-level authorities, including a
minister who semi-apologised for the use of the term against “90% of the press”, saying
he “used the word for the 10 per cent and they deserve that word”.

FIGURE 13: The term “presstitute” has been used by the Minister of State for External Affairs,
General V. K. Singh, a former army chief and central government minister in India since at least
2014, drawing the concern of the Editors Guild of India, who put out a statement in defense ofpress freedom.47

The intermingling of gendered abuse like ‘presstitutes’, ‘whore’, ‘witch’, ‘hag’ and ‘bitch’with abuse designed to undermine Ayyub’s professional credibility and trust such as‘fake news peddler’, ‘hypocrite’, ‘liar’, and ‘scammer’ is clear in the word cloud below,
which represents the 100 most prevalent abusive terms in our dataset.

47 In 2014 the Editors Guild of India said it was “distressing to find a person like General V. K. Singh using the term ‘presstitutes’ to describe journalists who wrote a story on the
movement of army units causing concern to the government, a statement unbecoming of a former chief of the Indian army”.

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your fake news
jerk
assholesmadarchod your ass

slut psycho

haramicovidiot

thief fuck you

panauti bullshit

chutiyaidiots ignorant
cowards scumbag
presstitutes witch
dumbassraand
fake news peddler stfu liarassfat

scum paki
dufferbloody jihadi bloody

pkmkb shut up idiot

bastardloserspuke

morons ugly����� bc

retardedfcukcowardhypocritefool moron
butt

dirty kutte
shitty shut the fuck up
silly

bitch

piece of shit
fuck off dumb criminal
kutiyapathetic mc�����
bloody hypocrite spreading lies
imbecile
bhadwashut your mouthloser
assholeretard whore

bastards

presstitute
randi
shit crap
liars fuck stupid
fu scammer

pakis
shitting damn hag
tmkb
you are a liar
bakwas b!tch fucking go to hellchootshitholelundbloody cowards
you are lying
dimwitfake news queen
bloody liar

FIGURE 14: Abstract representation of the 100 most prevalent abuse terms aimed at Ayyub in
the analyzed tweets. Term size reflects frequency of occurrence, for example ‘hypocrite’ occurs
most frequently.
In the misogynistic Instagram caricature pictured in Figure 15, Ayyub distinguishable by her curly dark hair and the suitcase with her name misspelled- is mocked for her ‘no-fly’ status. The cartoon was published the day after she
was briefly detained and prevented from boarding a flight to London.48 She isdepicted standing at an airport scanner with her hands up for a body checkfrom security. The words “COVID” and “FUNDS’’ are printed on oversizedbreasts. Off-stage, the security person is saying “Ma’am…it seems theseassets don’t belongs [sic] to you”. The hashtag used is #CovidFunds. Thishighly demeaning caricature was also widely distributed on Twitter.
FIGURE 15: On Instagram, a caricature of Ayyub making a misogynistic visual punon the money laundering accusations against her. It was first uploaded by right-wingcartoonist Manoj Kureel on 30 March, 2022.

48

Ayyub was to participate in an event directly linked to this study to be hosted by ICFJ and the international human rights firm Doughty Street Chambers.

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Ayyub believes that in India the character assassination of a woman is the easiest way
to neutralize her:It’s a patriarchal setup, where at the end of the day, you will only believe one
side of the view and somehow the character thing really hits you bad. So I do
go quiet, and the moment I would start tweeting again, they [trolls] would startputting the screenshots again. I would then go into a shell.
In 2012, Ayyub was accused of being seen with an intelligence officer in a purportedly
salacious video following another investigative story she wrote on Amit Shah.49 Although
the existence of the footage was never established, the accusation triggered a barrageof online attacks with the use of the hashtag #ranaayyubCD on Twitter designed tofuel interest in the rumors. As Ayyub told us, “With a woman, when you say ‘a video’,
you don’t need to say anything else, because then you are letting them know thatsomething exists, but something does not really exist.”
At the time, Ayyub’s then-managing editor at Tehelka, Shoma Chaudhary, wrote an
editorial blasting the sexist and Islamophobic campaign:

Over the past three years, Rana — one of Tehelka’s most sterling and fearlessjournalists — has doggedly chased the story of fake encounters in Gujarat.
Her journalism has been driven by a keen sense of justice and constitutional
values. Yet, as her scoops...began to make national headlines, she has had toface the humiliating experience of being assessed not as a professional but as a‘Muslim journalist’. Equally dismaying, a despicable slander campaign has been
unleashed against her — shadowy whispers about a CD involving her and CBIofficers that have absolutely no basis in truth. India is an imperfect experiment.
But if we abandon the poetic idea that underpins it, this is what we will get:
‘Hindu nationalists’, ‘Muslim journalists’, and women professionals we try todefang with scurrilous lies.
As the BJP, led by Modi, came to power in 2014, the hatred and abuse directed against
Ayyub grew manifoldly. And after the publication of her 2016 book about Gujarat Riots
investigation - Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover-Up50 - she found herself the target of
persistent and apparently coordinated troll attacks.
She recalls an incident involving a police officer from Gujarat whom she had mentioned
in her book. In a 2017 Facebook post51 the officer accused an unnamed journalist of‘honey-trapping’ police officers, but a news channel named Ayyub as the journalist
in question:

49 These stories pertained to a woman called Ishrat Jahan, whom Ayyub said was killed in a controversial ‘police encounter’ during Amit Shah’s tenure as Home Minister ofGujarat.
50 To date, the book has sold 750,000 copies in 14 languages.
51 The Facebook post by Sanjiv Bhatt reads: “The lawyer activist fell easy prey to the charms of the dusky chain smoking journalist and was more than happy to share juicy casedetails with her... The journalist wanted more... The younger of the two IPS officers was attracted to the journalist and she was attracted to him... little did the two lovers know atthat time that the Government Guest Houses where they used to meet for their amorous peccadilloes were discreetly bugged by the operatives of the State Police”.

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That post went viral on social media. And ‘India Today’, which is one of theleading news channels in the country, put out a headline that said ‘Top Cop in
Gujarat Accuses Journalist Rana Ayyub of Honey Trap’. That cop didn’t name me,
but these guys named me. Till today that thing has been used against me timeand again to kind of delegitimize me or discredit me.
In 2017, an old tweet from 2014 (in which Ayyub quotes and dismisses an abusive
tweet about Hindu nationalism directed towards her)52 resurfaced and was
misrepresented by trolls as sexually explicit abuse being used by Ayyub against
another user. It went viral and Ayyub was accused of indecent behavior andbombarded with religious slurs and demeaning abuse in response.
FIGURE 16: A 2014 tweet of Ayyub’s is reshared. The impression created by this oldstyle ‘quote tweet’ is that Ayyub is insulting Hindu problems, with a “m*therf*cker” styleinsult written in Hindi using Latin script.

The following year, in 2018, an eight-year-old girl was abducted, gang-raped
and killed by six Hindu men in the Kathua district of the Indian administered,Muslim-majority region of Jammu & Kashmir. After being critical of local BJP
leaders who had defended the Hindu suspects during an Al Jazeera
interview, Ayyub’s Muslim identity was conflated with her criticaljournalism. She faced rape and murder threats, and she was called“Islamist”, “Jihadi Jane”, and “ISIS sex slave”. Her abusers called for mob
attacks on Ayyub: “Go to her place, gang-rape her so she can understandhow it’s done”.
Then, an imposter tweet purporting to show Ayyub’s “support for childrapists” went viral. It was shared by Hindu far right sites, including Yogi
Adityanath ki Sena (@YogiGKP) - a popular right-wing Facebook page
named after the the former monk Ajay Singh Bisht, Chief Minister of
Uttar Pradesh (India’s most populous state in the north), who is viewed
as Modi’s successor.
A year later, the fraudulent tweet was still circulating after being amplified
by a number of prominent Indian figures, including film director Ashok
Pandit (president of the Indian Film & Television Directors’ Association),
escalating the risk that the online threats would spill offline.
FIGURE 17: Ayyub addresses a persistently viral fake tweet in which she
appears to defend child rapists.

On 23 April 2018, a deep fake pornographic video with Ayyub’s facesuperimposed on one of the actor’s heads went viral. She was slutshamed, and screenshots of the video were published on social media,
52 There was no ‘quote tweet’ function on Twitter until 2020. In 2014, Ayyub had recopied an abusive post adding the word ‘Discourse!’ in front of it. It said “@RanaAyyub talking
abt hindu problems is communal??teri maa ki chut saale” - the Hindi part meaning “your mother’s pussy bitch”. The Twitter user - whose profile bio at the time of writing is “I exist
because of @RanaAyyub”, and location is tagged as “Where There Is RanaAyyub” - had used abusive language in a (now deleted) tweet, and Ayyub had made that abuse public byadding the word ‘Discourse’ before it. Ayyub’s ‘quote tweet’ was designed to underscore how far the discourse of the Hindu right wing has penetrated. She was hugely trolled by
the right wing for the tweet.

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amplified by media personalities. She was also doxxed, with her phone number
being shared widely on social media. Recalling this period, Ayyub told us: “I
stepped out to a cafe and all I could think of was people looking at me. Are
people looking at me and are they thinking that I’m a promiscuous woman?”
In an interview for the now-defunct HuffPost India,53 Ayyub described how theabuse spread across platforms, and she said she was forced to temporarily
disable her Facebook account. The video was amplified on the fanpage of
BJP leader Yogi Adityanath, Modi’s close aide and chief minister of India’s
largest state, Uttar Pradesh; Ayyub was hospitalized after she was doxxed
and received messages on WhatsApp soliciting for sex. In 2018, she said: “It
ended up on almost every phone in India… It was devastating. I just couldn’t
show my face. You can call yourself a journalist, you can call yourself a feminist
but in that moment… I just couldn’t see through the humiliation.”
FIGURE 18: Ayyub shares a series of fraudulent tweets misappropriating her identity
which have been manipulated by Photoshop and deep fake AI technologies, including
a fake tweet from Air India booking her a one-way flight to Pakistan.

Ayyub reported the video to the police in April 2018. A month later,
as discussed above, UN experts intervened to lambast the Indian
government for failing to act to protect Ayyub in the context of thegendered disinformation she had experienced: “We are highly
concerned that the life of Rana Ayyub is at serious risk following thesegraphic and disturbing threats”.
She is still waiting for justice regarding the damaging deep fake porn video
first circulated in 2018. The matter was closed by the Delhi Police in 2020,
with no tangible outcome.
FIGURE 19: In July 2020, Ayyub shared various examples of abuse in her private Twitter
Direct Messages, written in Hindi (sometimes using English script), using religiously
bigoted terms such as ‘go to Pakistan’ and slurs about Ayyub as a Muslim as well as awoman, but also complete with obscene rape and death threats. Ayyub tags Mumbai
Police on Twitter, and adds that she is “reminded of Gauri Lankesh”, her friend who wasmurdered after online threats.

In January 2022, Ayyub was among 100 Muslim women listed for “online
auction” on an app called ‘Bulli bai’, hosted on Github. Images of the women
were misappropriated as part of the sexist and demeaning attack. Several
journalists were among those targeted and all of them were Muslim. The otherthing they had in common was they had all been critical of the Modi government
and its treatment of religious minorities. Bulli Bai (like its predecessor Sulli
Deals)54 was developed by right-wing Hindu nationalists.
The deepfake content designed to present her as promiscuous - along withthe slut shaming, rape threats, abuse and gendered slurs - are designed notjust to frighten Ayyub into retreat and chill writing, but also to destroy her
53 HuffPost India was shuttered in November 2020, and the original article is now offline.
54 ‘Sulli’ is a derogatory term used for Muslims; it is a slang expression believed to be a combination of “saali” “sister in law” - and “mulli” or “woman imam (priest)”.

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social standing and respectability. In a culturally and religiously conservative country
like India, questions raised about a woman’s character or morality can lead to significant
reputational damage and increase the physical risks she faces.

But as Ayyub has written, it is the intersectional nature of the attacks she experiences- at the nexus of misogyny and Islamophobia - which makes the attacks even moredamaging.

There is a section of the Indian media—and Indian society writ large—that
refuses to see this as yet another assault on the Muslim community. The auctionof Muslim women comes just three days after open calls for the genocide ofMuslims in the national capital, by nationalists including members of Modi’s
party, but liberals prefer to see this as a problem of misogyny, rather than ofIslamophobia.

4.5 Religious bigotry and the digitallynch mob: ‘Jihadi’, ‘terrorist’ and‘defamer’ of India
Rana Ayyub’s case presents a striking example of online violence at the intersectionof misogyny and religious bigotry. According to our analysis, misogynistic, sexist andsexually explicit abuse was a dominant feature of abuse across our dataset. But religion
and belief-based abuse was also prevalent.
Abuse in this category casts Ayyub as a threat to Hindus and an anti-nationalist
in response to her strong identification as a Muslim and her ongoing advocacy for
India’s Muslim communities. In this context, she is branded a “Jihadi”, a “terrorist” anda “defamer” of India. In one instance, the Karnataka state unit of the BJP referred to
Ayyub as “jihadi” in response to one of her tweets.

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FIGURE 20: On Reddit, a quote tweet is shared from the BJP Karnataka state Twitter accountreferring to Ayyub as “jihadi” in response to one of her tweets.
Ayyub’s international commentary over discrimination against girls wearing hijabs
to school in one Indian region has also attracted abuse. As discussed earlier, Ayyub
gave an interview to the BBC in November 2021 in which she was critical of a Hinduidentifying mob which had encircled a Muslim student wearing a hijab, calling them“Hindu terrorists”. This took place during a moral panic over Muslim women wearing
the hijab in India, after students wearing the Islamic headscarf were denied admission
to colleges. She reported a significant online backlash in connection with this episodeand it is also evident in our data.
In order to demonstrate the abuse Ayyub experiences at the nexus of misogyny
and religious bigotry, we studied all uses of the term ‘presstitute/s’ in our dataset incombination with terms pertaining to her religious identity. The clearly misogynistic
portmanteau - which targets Ayyub both as a woman and in her professional capacity
as a journalist - is very often accompanied by abuse which could be interpreted as
Islamophobic. In fact, 29.3% of abuse directed at Rana Ayyub in conjunction with theterm ‘presstitute’ can be interpreted as religious bigotry.

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FIGURE 21: This graph demonstrates the prevalence of religious bigotry in abusive tweets
deploying the insult “presstitute”, highlighting the intersectional nature of the online violence that
Ayyub experiences.

Ayyub, who bears a Muslim name and is a bold defender of Muslim minorities online
while also being extremely critical of Modi’s Hindu nationalist government, was not
surprised at these findings:

My journalism has always, always been viewed from the prism of my faith... Thisecosystem is from a majority community and you realize every day gradually it’sunraveling that a big part of the problem is my Muslimness... Every time I speak
about an issue, people are always looking at the Muslimness of the story - whowrote the story?
Kunal Majumder from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in India told researchersthat the data shows a systematic pattern in which Muslim women journalists arebeing targeted across the country55 by the government and its followers. Thesejournalists are being intimidated56 not only through online violence but also via judicial
harassment: “These are based on observations backed by facts that over the last one
year, mostly the journalists who have been targeted are women and most of them are
Muslims.”
Among the most amplified abusive tweets directed at Rana Ayyub in our database, (i.e.
when re-tweeted abuse is included) are posts including the hashtags #delhigenocide2020,#delhiriots. The hashtags point towards the February 2020 communal violence innorth-east Delhi in which more than 50 people, mostly Muslims,57 were killed following
protests by the minority community against the ‘discriminatory’ Citizenship Amendment
Act passed by the Modi government the previous year. The Act allowed non-Muslims
55 Other prominent Muslim woman journalists being targeted include Fatima Khan (then of The Print) and Ismat Ara (The Wire). In January 2022, they were two of 80 women- including Ayyub - to be offered up for an “online auction” on the now-defunct bullibai.github.io website and app. Ara filed a “First Information Report” (FIR) asking for the Islamophobic abuse and doctored image of her to be investigated by Delhi Police’s cyber cell unit. In an interview with Al Jazeera English in July 2021, Khan said it comes in a climate
where women are speaking out more about this misogynistic and Islamophobic abuse, in a culture of impunity.
56 Majumder said that the targeted group also includes those “who are relatively new to the profession”, such as journalism students - including those studying at international
universities.
57 A sit-in by women against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was in progress when a leader of the ruling party (BJP) asked the Delhi police to ‘clear the streets of these
protestors’, failing which he would clear the streets with his supporters. A clash broke out between Hindus and Muslims. However, Muslims bore the brunt of the bloodshed, property destruction, and rioting. Hindu mobs beat, lynched, and burnt Muslims. Mosques were burnt, Muslim businesses and properties were destroyed, Muslims were dragged out of
their houses and were burnt alive and lynched. While Hindus also suffered losses, Muslims were disproportionately targeted in the riots. The police were accused of enabling andencouraging (allegedly joining) the Hindu mobs.

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from neighboring Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh to fast-track visa
applications. Ayyub’s Twitter abusers alleged she was lying or exaggerating
the situation due to a Muslim bias, thus attacking her journalistic credibility
and professional reputation with the effect of undercutting her criticism of
the Modi government.
In July 2020, when she sent a few tweets criticizing the Indian state’s handlingof the conflict-torn Kashmir valley, Ayyub was subjected to yet another
online barrage. “When I speak about Kashmir, trolls from all sides come andattack me,” Ayyub told researchers. In Indian administered Kashmir, anotheroverwhelmingly Muslim region, journalists doing their job are arrested forallegedly posting “anti-national posts”. For example, in northeastern states
like Tripura, journalists have been charged under the Unlawful Activities(Prevention) Act for reporting during communal riots in the state.
FIGURE 22: An online troll accusing Rana Ayyub of siding with the “anti-India nexus”.
Ayyub is often termed as “anti-India” and “anti-national” for calling out state violence in theconflict torn Muslim-majority region of Indian Administered Kashmir.

4.6 Foreigners and foreign
State actors
Delving deeper into the data, we also see abuse towards Ayyub designed to suggest
her alignment with foreign Muslim States and fuel enmity towards her from Indian
nationalists. For example, we identified the hashtag #pkmkb (“Pakistan ki maa ka bhosda”
in Hindi, which loosely translates to the “vagina of Pakistan’s mother”) as the second
most prominent hashtag featured in the abuse dataset after #presstitutes. ‘Pkmkb’ isan abusive phrase used to propagate aggression and hatred towards Pakistan.
It was first used to mock the Pakistani cricket team but started trending in February
2019 after the Pulwama attack, when a convoy of vehicles carrying Indian security
personnel was attacked by a suicide bomber in the state of Jammu & Kashmir. The#pkmkb hashtag is used in tweets as an abusive hashtag and also just to reference
Pakistan. Ayyub is often told to “return to Pakistan” or that she belongs there. Most of
the tweets associated with this term just contain multiple user handles followed byhashtags referencing Pakistan, terrorism, and Islam, a pattern of behavior which canbe associated with incitement to pile-on.
Another example is #harami_kaum, an abusive phrase used to reference the Muslim
community in India specifically. Use of this term demonstrates how persistent some of
the troll accounts targeting Ayyub are. The hashtag in Hindi seems to have been used
and amplified exclusively by one Twitter user, who posted 568 tweets with that hashtag
between July 2021 and Feb 2022. Many were replies to their own tweets, repeatedly
trying to draw others into the abuse through the use of mentions and hashtags.
Both hashtags explicitly reflect the anti-Muslim rhetoric used by right-wing Hindus,
where Muslims as a whole are referred to as ‘Bastard Nation’. The ‘Go to Pakistan’rhetoric is also favored by the ruling BJP party and its supporters. Any Muslim living
in India and seen as a critic of the government is considered loyal to India’s regional43

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rival Pakistan (a Muslim-majority state) by right-wing Hindu nationalists. Thus,
Ayyub is often called on to ‘prove’ her nationalism.
A prominent spike in online abuse in the Twitter dataset occurred between
10 and 12 November 2021, when Ayyub received 660 abusive tweets while
tweeting about a cricket match between Australia and Pakistan. Unlike previous
spikes, where the abuse detected was predominantly in English, in this case,over 30% of abusive tweets are in Hindi and only 24% in English.
A Pakistani ministerial tweet praising Ayyub’s reporting in January 2020 led
to an abusive backlash against Ayyub on various news media channels andonline. She was labeled anti-national, and received a barrage of insults andtaunts on Twitter for getting praise from ‘enemy’ Pakistan and revealing her“real motives”. This is reflected by a small abuse spike in our data.
An anchor for Republic TV, with a pro-government editorial line, said: “Doesn’treally come as a surprise, but Pakistan has literally gone on to state on recordand Rana Ayyub here winning praises from Pakistan. She has received basicallyan award or commendation from Pakistan for attacking the government
relentlessly”.
FIGURE 23: A tweet from the account of a Pakistani minister in support of Ayyub’s
reporting led to a pile-on against her, fanning the flames of anti-nationalism.

Republic TV even conducted a debate on the issue. Journalist Arnab Goswami
termed Ayyub “insanely anti-India”, while repeatedly referring to her as a troll
and part of “Lutyens’ Media”58 working against the nation. Ayyub wondered
how a news channel “could spend half an hour on me getting funding from
Imran Khan…how are you not scared of defamation? They’re not scared ofanything”.
The majority of TV news channels in India prioritize highly emotionally-charged
debates which are devoid of reporting and frequently focused on vilifying
minorities.59 Many of these channels are blatant in their endorsement of theModi government and its policies. Those criticizing the establishment view,
including Ayyub, are routinely attacked by these channels, which often label
them as ‘anti-national’, fuelling online attacks.
Government officials such as Minority Affairs Minister Abbas Naqvi Mukhtar
have also weighed in, further fueling the online threats against Ayyub bytargeting her on these partisan TV talk shows. “Rana Ayyub is a part of a
global conspiracy to defame India,’’ he said in a TV debate. In another prime
time debate, the national spokesperson of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP),
Syed Zafar Islam, said: “Rana Ayyub works against the interests of our nation.
It is beyond any doubt… I have no hesitation telling that she is anti-national,
works at the behest of Pakistan and some foreign media”.
FIGURE 24: An insulting reply to a tweet claiming to know Ayyub’s “agenda” andcalling her an “idiot”.
58 Lutyens is an area in Delhi that houses India’s parliament and the presidential palace. It is considered to be a power center of Delhi where many journalists meet to cover India’s political bigwigs. “Lutyens’ media” is now often used in a derogatory way by pro-State journalists to refer to journalists who are sympathetic to the opposition and left parties.
59 Research published on independent news site News Laundry found that an overwhelming majority of the primetime debates on India’s mainstream national television focus
on either attacking opposition parties or regional arch-rival Pakistan, or praising Modi and his party.

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4. Detailed analysis of our Twitter dataset

BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

Having seeded these narratives over time, perpetrators have also targeted Ayyub withdisinformation-based attacks designed to direct the ire of Hindu nationalists and theirpatriotic troll armies towards Ayyub. One imposter tweet purporting to be posted by
Ayyub’s account in 2017 read, “I despise India and Indians”. Such disinformation tactics
expose the target to significantly greater risk offline, especially in a country where
digital lynch mobs have moved offline, leading to deaths.

FIGURES 25/26: Ayyub shares the fraudulent tweets posted in April 2018.
This portrayal of Ayyub as an “anti-nationalist” also involves portraying her as aninternationalist captured by foreign interests, craving the world stage, and indulging
in what is perceived to be Western conduct, not fitting with behaviors routinely
associated with traditional Muslim women.

FIGURES 27/28: Abuse online is directed against Ayyub for being abroad and for the way she
dresses in an effort to undermine her advocacy for Muslim Indian women and girls who choose towear a hijab.

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4. Detailed analysis of our Twitter dataset

BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub#SaudiArabia

FIGURE 29: Tweet by Rana Ayyub which led to a spike in online abuse against her from Twitterusers she perceived to be nationalist Saudi trolls online.

When Ayyub tweeted strident criticism of the Saudi-led coalition backing the Yemeni
government against the Houthi group supported by Iran, she said she received thousandsof hateful responses. They included multiple rape and death threats, along with abusecalling her a terrorist sympathizer. The numerous hate comments she received caused
her name to trend on Twitter for many days.
Relevantly, the hashtags #saudi, and #saudiarabia are among the most amplified
abusive tweets directed at Rana Ayyub in our database. They are used in tweets
accusing Ayyub of making false statements (including calling her a liar, a ‘presstitute’ ora snake), or questioning her credibility. It is particularly striking that the following tweet(originally posted by an account with 65,000 followers) has been repeated verbatim,
or with additional text, in 1,673 tweets (103 original, replies, or quoted retweets and1,570 verbatim retweets of these):

Saudis are rightly thrashing60 Rana Ayyub for her meltdown on Saudi Arabia
airstrikes against Yemen. Her CREDIBILITY has always been Questionable. Here
Journalist Dhume @dhume POINT BLANK STATES ‘I question the Credibility ofRana’ #SaudiArabia #Saudi

60 According to an investigation by The Quint, ‘Modi follows a handful of over 2,300 people, including the likes of Nikhil Dadhich who celebrated the assassination of journalist
Gauri Lankesh’. The article also names two accounts who have abused Ayyub, but are allegedly followed by Modi.

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5.  Perpetration and facilitation

BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

5

PERPETRATION
AND FACILITATION:
High speed, virtually unchecked, andpotentially coordinated abuse

5. Perpetration and facilitation
An important aspect of the online violence directed
at Rana Ayyub is the apparently coordinatednature of the pile-ons targeting her. These involve
accounts that appear to be designed for anddedicated to trolling. In some cases, they arefollowed by top leaders of the ruling party, including
Prime Minister Modi. 61
Ayyub’s former editor at the Washington Post,
Elias Lopez, told us about the “echo chamber”
created in response to Ayyub’s journalism becauseof coordinated attacks by highly organized online
groups “that are very close to the government” andare “right wing cells”. The effect on this reaction
to Ayyub and her journalism, he said, is “verypropagandizing”:
61 According to an investigation by The Quint, ‘Modi follows a handful of over 2,300
people, including the likes of Nikhil Dadhich who celebrated the assassination of journalist
Gauri Lankesh’. The article also names two accounts who have abused Ayyub, but are
allegedly followed by Modi.

“What we see is thatonce a lie is repeated bythese groups, it is picked
up by media organizations
that are ideologicallyclose to these groups,
and obviously designed
to amplify their baselessclaims against Rana.”

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5.  Perpetration and facilitation

BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

Almost instantaneous abuse
A particularly important, and to date overlooked aspect of online abuse and trolling is
how quickly abusive replies to Ayyub start to pile up when she tweets. The speed ofabusive replies is noteworthy as a potential indicator of coordination or orchestration.
Our data analysis demonstrated that Ayyub can start receiving abusive replies within
14 seconds of posting a tweet. As can be seen from the graph below, there is a spikein abusive replies within one to two minutes of a post by Ayyub, with abuse startingto tail off gradually, but still running at high levels for the first 10-15 minutes.

FIGURE 30: Number of minutes until the first abusive reply to tweets by Rana Ayyub.
The shape of this abuse curve is very unusual and indicates that soon after posting,Ayyub is highly likely to be exposed to a lot of abusive replies. By way of comparison,
according to our Big Data Case Study on Filipino-American journalist Maria Ressa, theabuse she sustains on Twitter, while still severe, tends to be more spread out over time.

FIGURE 31: For comparison: the number of minutes until the first abusive reply to tweets byrenowned Filipino-American journalist Maria Ressa.

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5.  Perpetration and facilitation

BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

Who are Rana Ayyub’s attackers?
In the climate of impunity surrounding attacks on journalists in India, andespecially Muslim journalists, Ayyub’s online attackers have become emboldened
and many have emerged as identifiable perpetrators. They are also now more
inclined to hurl threats and abuse in more public social media spaces, rather
than from locked accounts or private messages, Ayyub said:

The people who would earlier DM me abusive things and ask me about rape, now...
they post on my timeline... It used to be bots. Now they are people with an identity
and they’re not scared, they put their [profile] picture, and they’re not scared to givea death and rape threat... If you go and see, it’s very scary because they’re all very
young boys. And if you see their Instagram pages, they’re normal living, breathingpeople.
In early 2023, on her return to India from the US to face court, Ayyub told Canada’s CBC:
“This gentleman — who’s not a bot, who has a profile picture with his child — has sentme a note that he is going to come to my house and cut me to pieces … for defaming
India on an international level, for defaming Hindus on an international level”.
When we plot the graph of the 500 accounts which sent the most abuse in replies to Rana’s
tweets, we see a dense, inter-connected network. This indicates that many accounts sent
abusive replies to the same set of tweets.

FIGURE 32: Graph of 500 anonymized accounts which co-abused Ayyub by sending abusive
replies to one or more of the same tweets by Ayyub; the thicker the edges between them, the moreabusive replies they sent to the same tweet(s).

495.  Perpetration and facilitation

BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

According to our analysis, one account colored in blue stands out in particular because
it provided numerous hostile replies to 27 of Ayyub’s tweets. When we examine it further,
it appears to be at the heart of a network of accounts that coordinate to troll and abuse
Ayyub. It also has some relationships to other communities of accounts that have coabused Ayyub.
The dominant Twitter account in the network map of co-abusers above (Figure 32) iscurrently inactive, but it continues to be tagged in numerous tweets and is often co-taggedwith high-profile personalities affiliated with Hindu nationalists, including members of theruling BJP party. These tweets are mostly either directly targeting Muslims or are replies tosuch tweets. Another account sending a lot of abuse has been suspended by Twitter forviolating its terms of service. It is most likely that this troll account was registered earlier
under a very similar handle and therefore it is highly likely that it will surface again. An
account that stands at the center of the red-colored community depicted in the graphhas a handle derived from Harry Potter and originally joined Twitter in December 2019.
Several other accounts in prominent positions in the main network graph in Figure 32
were investigated, including:•••An account which has been on Twitter since November 2015, with a modest
set of followers (145 as of June 2022). Via Botometer,62 a random sample
of 20 of these followers was checked: 9 of them were flagged as orangeor red (i.e., suspicious), with two others being flagged as inactive without
a timeline (another potential marker of a suspicious account). Many of the
flagged accounts had Twitter handles consisting of a common name like
‘Amit’ or ‘Jenny’, and were followed by several accounts similar in format tothe suspended account discussed above.
An account with 1966 in the handle, which could be their birth year, joined
Twitter in 2011 and is followed by just over 700 users, while following morethan 2,000 itself. Fewer of its random sample of 20 followers were flagged
as suspicious by Botometer compared to the account above. It has a 22%
retweet ratio (which is high and potentially indicative of a troll account). The
user’s description says that the user is a Hindu who believes in Modi.
Another account in this cluster self-identifies as a vegan and animalliberation activist and has a 29% retweet ratio (which is high and potentiallyindicative of a troll account). With 99 followers, the user has been on Twitter
since October 2018. A Botometer check of a random sample of 20 of thesefollowers flagged 8 of these as orange or red, with three of them flagged asinactive without a timeline. Most of the followers have a higher bot scorethan the user. Two of the followers with the highest bot score were accounts
with non-south Asian names (‘Lin’ and ‘Jiao’).

62 Botometer is a bot-detection program that monitors the activity of Twitter accounts and classifies them as a human or a bot based on a score.

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6.CONCLUSIONBIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

Twitter as an online violence facilitator and failed responder
Ayyub’s response to the rapid-fire online violence she experiences has included multiple
attempts – publicly and privately, online and offline – to call Twitter to act against her
abusers as the primary vector for the online violence she experiences. And, although anumber of accounts prevalent in our abuse dataset were suspended during the periodof study, the scale and unrelenting nature of the online violence that Ayyub experiences
are indicative of Twitter’s abject failure to stem the tide of abuse.
This is despite the fact that Ayyub has a verified Twitter account, she routinely reports
the abuse she receives to the platform, and her high-profile case has been placed on
the company’s radar by civil society organizations many times over the past decade.
As Ayyub told us: “There is absolutely no sincerity in their promises”. However, she
acknowledges that had it not been for Twitter, “the people of this country would probably
not be aware of what I’m facing in India. So, to that extent, it’s a great platform. But thecons outweigh the pros awfully.”
While Twitter has failed to effectively address the relentless abuse that Ayyub experienceson the platform, in June 2022 it censored a number of her tweets at the behest of the
Indian government. “The trolls and the State have realized that these social media
platforms are dependent on them. They [Twitter] really are seeing only their market
and not the safety of journalists or anybody who’s a public voice,” Ayyub said. However,
Twitter commenced legal action against the Indian government over the censorshiporder the following month, reportedly arguing that it was “overbroad, arbitrary anddisproportionate”.

6.CONCLUSION

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

6

CONCLUSION
Impunity for the online violence against Rana Ayyub on Twitter, and across thesocial web, increases her exposure to offline harm in one of the world’s mostdangerous countries to practice journalism. It is also a significant feature of
the enabling environment for Ayyub’s legal harassment.
While her experiences are far from unique in India, her case is emblematicof the targeting of female journalists in the country. The hallmarks of these
attacks are the digital ‘lynch mobs’ that align themselves with India’s Hindu
nationalist ruling party. Such attacks are invariably overtly misogynistic anddisinformation-laced. In Ayyub’s case, they also operate at the intersection ofreligious bigotry, with her Muslim faith being targeted in attacks that have seen
her branded a ‘jihadi’ and a ‘terrorist’.
These attacks are fanned and fuelled by heavily partisan tabloid TV networks
and propaganda websites masquerading as news outlets that frame her criticalreporting and commentary for international news organizations as evidenceof foreign influence and disloyalty to India, making her an even bigger target.

The clear objective is to silence Ayyub. But the more she is attacked, theharder she fights back. As a journalist, as a Muslim, and as a woman.

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

POSTSCRIPT
6.CONCLUSIONIn February 2023, as this report was being finalized for publication, Mumbai police
registered a case against the author of the misogynistic cartoon depicting Ayyub with
inflated breasts and bags of cash at Mumbai airport (See Figure 15), which spread
across social media in March 2022 after she was blocked from flying to London. The
police issued a First Information Report (FIR) in response to a complaint lodged by
Ayyub, which was seen by the authors.
This Big Data Case Study is one of a series in production focusing on emblematiccases of gendered online violence, examining the core of digital attacks throughcomputational analysis of millions of social media accounts blended with contextual
research, to provide hard evidence to demonstrate the lived experience of journalists
under attack online. This report was produced as part of a broader project investigating
the development of an Online Violence Early Warning System.
In partnership with computer scientists from the University of Sheffield, the project isdesigned to identify key indicators and metrics signaling escalation of online violenceagainst women journalists. They are studying the two-way trajectory between online
and offline attacks and developing open-source digital tools to detect, monitor andalert key responders to high-risk cases.

FURTHER RESOURCES:

•
•
•
•
•

“Maria Ressa: Fighting an Onslaught of Online Violence” (2021), the first major
Big Data Case Study of its kind focused on the torrent of online violence facing
women journalists who work on the new front line of journalism safety, at theepicenter of digital age risks, by ICFJ and the University of Sheffield.
Read further ICFJ big data case studies on journalists Carole Cadwalladr(UK), Ghada Oueiss (Lebanon/Qatar), with more to come - including Carmen
Aristegui (Mexico), Marianna Spring (UK) and the women journalists of Daily
Maverick (South Africa).
The Chilling: A Global Study of Online Violence Against Women Journalists(2022), a groundbreaking global study on online violence against womenjournalists that includes over 100 recommendations for action, by ICFJ and
UNESCO.
“A global snapshot of the incidence and impacts of online violence against
women journalists” (2020), based on a survey conducted by ICFJ and UNESCO.
Online Violence Response Hub, founded by IWMF and ICFJ as a project of the
Coalition Against Online Violence (COAV).

53BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

About the authors:
Dr. Julie Posetti is Deputy Vice President and Global Director of Research at theInternational Center for Journalists (ICFJ). A multi award-winning feminist journalist,
researcher and journalism educator, Dr. Posetti is academically affiliated with theReuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford and the Centre
for Freedom of the Media (CFOM) at the University of Sheffield. Dr. Posetti is authorof Protecting Journalism Sources in the Digital Age (UNESCO: 2017), and co-authorof The Chilling: A Global Study of Online Violence Against Women Journalists (ICFJUNESCO: 2O22), Balancing Act: Countering Disinformation While Respecting Freedomof Expression (UNESCO-UN Broadband Commission: 2020), and Journalism, Fake
News and Disinformation (UNESCO: 2019).

Professor Kalina Bontcheva is a Research Professor of Text Analytics at the
University of Sheffield and member of the Centre for Freedom of the Media (CFOM),
specializing in analyzing online abuse and disinformation.

Hanan Zaffar is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in South Asia. His
work from the region has appeared in Time, Business Insider, Newsweek, Middle East
Eye, DW News, and on Al Jazeera, VICE, Channel 4, and others.

Dr. Diana Maynard is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield anda member of the Centre for Freedom of the Media (CFOM), specializing in Natural
Language Processing, social media analysis, and media freedom issues.

Nabeelah Shabbir is Senior Research Associate at the International Center for
Journalists and a British-Pakistani freelance journalist. At The Guardian, she shareda British Journalism Prize with the ‘Keep it in the Ground’ team in 2015. She has coauthored a series of reports for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at
the University of Oxford. She is co-author of The Chilling: A Global Study of Online
Violence Against Women Journalists (ICFJ-UNESCO: 2O22).

Mughda Pandya is a Research Associate at the University of Sheffield. She works
on Natural Language Processing with a focus on fairness in hate speech detection.

COVER PHOTO CREDIT: Dominik Osvald
DESIGN AND LAYOUT: Luiza Maximo

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BIG DATA CASE STUDY // Rana Ayyub

About ICFJ:ICFJ empowers an unparalleled global network of journalists to produce news
reports that lead to better governments, stronger economies, more vibrantsocieties and healthier lives. ICFJ also helps improve the working lives ofjournalists through ‘action research’ collaborations on the safety of womenjournalists, disinformation and trust, and journalism in a post-pandemic world.

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