He urges, ”Don't character-kill someone based on their name without knowing their real identity. Such accusations can turn the world of an innocent person upside down.”
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Sangam Bista, who hails from Surkhet and has been working in Finland for two years, was not very interested in social media. However, on the night of April 3, a 'digital tsunami' came into her life, which did not allow her to live peacefully even across the seven seas.
After another Sangam Bista, who lives in America, went public with the violence she suffered on social media, Sangam from Finland became a victim of 'cyber bullying' because they had the same name.
She had slept late on the day she left work in Finland. It was nightfall in Finland at 1 am in Nepal. As soon as Sangam, who was in America, made her pain public, Nepal's social media was already heated, but Sangam from Finland was completely unaware of this.
When she used her mobile around 12 noon, she saw an unnatural increase in views and followers on her TikTok account. 'I'm not very active on social media. I was shocked to see millions of views and followers all of a sudden,' she said, recalling that day. Out of curiosity, she posted two videos within a minute, which quickly gained millions of views.
But when she opened the message box, she was shocked. There was no praise, but a barrage of character assassination and vile accusations. 'I was so shocked to see the flood of abuse in the message requests that I have no words to describe it. I was mentally disturbed,' she said. 'Those messages contained heinous accusations like trying to trap a guy, bargaining and damaging someone else's house.' Feeling that the digital crowd had lost even common sense, she started deleting and blocking messages, but the abuse did not stop.
The attacks did not stop there. Social media users started linking her photo to the controversial incident in America and making it go viral. She said that she is married and has two families to protect. She complained that the abuse did not stop even when she tried to clarify on TikTok that she was not the controversial person but only a name. 'I said on TikTok that I was not that person, but the attacks did not stop, on the contrary, more abuse started coming,' she said.
She believes that this incident has exposed the ugly side of Nepali society's use of social media. She said that attacking an innocent person without knowing the truth in the name of getting justice for someone is a serious crime.
'The distance between America, Finland and Nepal is thousands of miles. But the wrong tag on social media erased that distance and painted the innocent as a criminal,' she urged, adding, 'Having the same name was not my crime, but the digital crowd put me in the dock of a criminal. Don't character-kill someone based on their name without knowing their real identity. Such baseless accusations can turn the world of an innocent person upside down.'
