Inside the toxic world of online trolls and the devastation they cause

A Molotov cocktail of lies, abuse and bigotry is blowing up social media

Her nightmare never lets up. It makes her shrink in public and weep in private. Her life turned upside down after an abusive boyfriend posted nude photographs of her online. By the time social media moderators took them down, the clips had been viewed several hundred times. Removing them provided no relief either, because the internet is relentless in its distribution of information — like the demon that rises from each drop of his blood, so do the bytes and pixels. 

“She is traumatised, doesn’t leave her home without her face covered,” says Prashant Mali, a Mumbai-based cybersecurity lawyer. This was