Defaming Dissidents
Tavleen Singh, in her column for The Indian Express, writes about the growing and dangerous trend of using social media to defame and malign those accused of crimes, regardless of whether the said crimes have been proven in the court of law or not. Singh argues that this is a weapon of harassment used to steal all credibility from the accused, as was recently done in the case of fact-checker Mohammed Zubair, where it was alleged that he was paid to tweet, or that he was an agent working for a foreign authority. The author writes that even though Zubair is a free man now, his career may have been impaired for good due to this mud-slinging.