Rana Ayyub, the face of India’s women journalists plagued by cyber-harassment
Rana Ayyub, a columnist for the American media outlet The Washington Post, is regularly the target of violent online smear campaigns. From doxxing to threats and false rumours, the renowned journalist is targeted on all fronts. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls on the Indian authorities to put a definitive end to this horrible harassment by ensuring these crimes are punished, and urges the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) to pay attention to flagged content and uphold its moderation responsibilities.
On the night of 8 November, Rana Ayyub received over "200 calls and obscene messages,” as she told RSF, just a few minutes after @HPhobiaWatch, an account on the social media platform X, published Rana Ayyub's personal telephone number, encouraging his followers to harass her. The @HPhobiaWatch account is managed by an anonymous influencer affiliated with Hindutva, a Hindu supremacist movement, posting under the pseudonym Hindutva Knight,
Following this initial wave of attacks, a screenshot of a pornographic deepfake of Rana Ayyub was circulated on social networks. Soon after, other accounts linked to the same nationalist movement leaked the journalist’s identity documents and the passwords to her social media accounts. False rumours and tweets attributing false statements to her went viral.
The 40-year-old journalist, a columnist for the American daily The Washington Post since 2018, filed a complaint on 9 November with the Bombay cybercrime police, providing them with the identity of the author of the first hate post on X, the administrator of the @HPhobiaWatch and @TheSquind accounts, which was revealed by an investigation by the fact-checking media Alt News. According to Alt News, the perpetrator of the hate campaign worked closely with the ruling Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as a content analyst in charge of the party's social networks. When contacted by RSF, the police said that the investigation was ongoing, and no arrests had been made at this stage.
"The day after the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, RSF condemns the violent cyber-harassment of Rana Ayyub. The Indian journalist has become a symbol of online attacks on the independent press and women journalists. Dozens of other Indian journalists and journalists working in India have been subjected to similar campaigns of intimidation and hatred, mostly from networks coordinated by India’s nationalist far right. For years, Rana Ayyub has been the victim of harassment, disinformation campaigns and abusive legal proceedings. The Indian authorities are aware of these violent attacks through the legal complaints that have been filed, and RSF holds them responsible for the journalist's safety. The Mumbai police must complete the investigation into this doxxing and cyber-harassment as quickly as possible, and the perpetrators must be brought to justice without delay. It is also up to X to take into account the journalist’s reports flagging the harmful content and accounts — which, so far, have gone unanswered — and to uphold its moderation responsibilities.
“How do you shame and silence a woman who refuses to give in. You try to assault her character, try to outrage her modesty, make her fearful of operating her social media accounts, share rumors about her morality and the myth that she sleeps around to get her stories, the oldest stereotype in the book,” Rana Ayyub posted on the social media platform Instagram on 17 November. 3Listen up you sick people, I ain’t going anywhere. Thank you for making me realise that my work is making an impact, that my words scare you, that my existence challenges your cowardice and hate."
Surveillance and intimidation
The Indian journalist told RSF that she had also been stalked recently while reporting in the state of Manipur in October 2024. She says she was constantly followed, “ they even followed me to the washroom” by people posing as local intelligence agents. “They questioned the owners of my hotel, seeking details of my presence.” The situation became particularly worrying when her sources began to feel threatened. “Half the people I was supposed to meet refused out of fear for their safety,” explained Ayyub. “How can you do journalism when you are under such intense surveillance?"
Author of the investigative non-fiction book “Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up”, which revealed the complicity of state institutions in the 2002 riots, Rana Ayyub has been the victim of successive waves of judicial, digital and physical harassment for several years.
In October 2024, RSF published the report “Journalism in the MeToo era”, revealing the extent to which cyber-harassment is used as a means of repression to silence women journalists around the world.
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