Indian teen influencer’s death spotlights toxic cyberbullying of LGBTQ folk: ‘people were telling me to die’
- The death of Priyanshu Yadav, 16, reveals the extent of abuse faced by India’s LGBTQ community, with many receiving hate and death threats for expressing themselves online
- Activists and LGBTQ folk call for stronger legal action against cyberbullying and say social media platforms need to shoulder more responsibility in countering abuse
Priyanshu Yadav was a 16-year-old makeup influencer living in the central Indian city of Ujjain. An Instagram post dated November 12 showed him dressed in sari and decked in jewellery and makeup – a fitting outfit for the Hindu festival of Diwali that day. The post, however, attracted hundreds of hateful comments and even rape threats.
Nine days after that post, Yadav, also known as Pranshu, reportedly took his own life.
The tragic death shook the country’s LGBTQ community, putting a spotlight on the toxic and sometime deadly impact cyberbullying can have on queer youth.
Queer individuals, rights activists and cyberbullying experts told This Week in Asia that India’s LGBTQ users face persistent online abuse, especially on Instagram and Facebook, despite the platforms promising to rein in such harassment. The outpouring of sadness over Yadav’s death has done little to stem the flood of hateful comments.
“I got a lot of hate after Pranshu’s death,” said Mumbai-based makeup influencer Shivam Bhardwaj, 25, who had posted a tribute video to Yadav on Instagram in which he had applied makeup as a way to process the grief and remember the teen.
“People were asking when I am dying and telling me to die in the [Instagram] comments. How can you wish that for someone?”
A 2023 social media safety index by the American LGBTQ advocacy organisation GLAAD found that platforms “continue to fail at enforcing the safeguarding of LGBTQ users from online hate speech”. While Instagram and Facebook – popular among content creators in India as TikTok is banned in the country – scored better than the previous year, the report said safety of LGBTQ users “remain[s] unsatisfactory”.
Despite the lack of India-specific surveys highlighting the extent of online harassment against LGBTQ users, anecdotal evidence and media reports underscore the trend. Bhardwaj and Yadav’s Instagram posts – the latter’s account is now private – are flooded with name-calling, homophobic slurs and comments encouraging self-harm.
