Trolling is Not the Point: Ideological Violence and the Limits of Digital Safety

As academic and activist spaces move online, queer, Dalit and feminist voices increasingly face repression through targeted digital attacks. Such attacks are not just limited to social media comments but have also affected real-time meetings on conferencing platforms. In this commentary, I reflect on one such incident of Dalit trans autobiography discussion session, which was disrupted through pornographic videos and obscene threats. These incidents occur within a political environment where the Indian state advertises itself to be queer-inclusive on a global stage, while continuing to stifle dissenting voices domestically. Right-wing actors increasingly frame feminist, queer or anti-caste movements as anti-national, leading to intensified surveillance, harassment and erasure. I situate this instance within broader patterns of ideological violence and homonationalist disciplining through a narration of other targeted attacks in different institutional settings. Drawing on Puar's concept of homonationalism and recent work on digital harassment, I argue that such disruptions do not function as isolated trolling but rather deliberative acts that oppose political forms of queerness demanding rights and accountability from the state. They tend to reinforce casteist, heteronormative and nationalist boundaries of inclusion. These attacks reveal how conferencing platforms reproduce precarity for marginalised voices. The commentary calls for a reframing of digital safety not as a technical or individual task, but as a collective, political responsibility shaped by platform design, institutional complicity, and ideological violence.