I’ll be 39 in exactly ten days. I’m a mother of two daughters—21 and 15. I have all the privileges that you can count—caste, class, religion, skin colour, education, everything. My LinkedIn profile is for everyone to see and assess my professional standing. I have been writing books, book chapters, journal papers, issue briefs, policy papers, media commentaries, poetry, and even extended social media posts on gender equity, violence against women, women’s health, etc, for the past 18 years. 

Yet, I’m utterly helpless, and I don’t know when this will stop. The screenshots are self-explanatory. 

Predictably, this sexual harassment started innocuously with a LinkedIn connection request from a man named Tulsi Kumar and my polite response to a “thank you for adding me” message in May 2024. Then came a barrage of unsolicited DMs on LinkedIn, ostensibly for professional work. I ignored it all. (Us women, we get by with ignoring a lot.)

Making Women Invisible

And on the morning of 10 September, I woke up to the same old sexually charged bullshit. This man also found my Instagram earlier yesterday and left likes and comments there. I’ve had a policy of keeping my social accounts open because that’s who I am as a person—transparency, etc. 

The screenshots clearly reveal that this behaviour was entirely unprovoked, far from being impulsive, almost premeditated. And that apology? It’s as if “liking” me “too much” mandates this behaviour. I made him do it. 

What is it about men? Why must they act like subhumans almost every time? Women are made to watch over their shoulders even more in digital space.  I have written multiple times about the intellectual moorings of this trend of making women invisible by either blocking women’s entry to, or bullying them out of public spaces. It is clear that men have a problem with women in general. But the world is, generally, comfortable with it. The only problem is with women highlighting this problem that men have a problem with women. Families, establishments, technocrats, editors—all act in unison to tackle that problem.

A Daily Dose Of Hatred

“Not all men” tribe, please sit down. Unless you wake up to such crudeness and sexual harassment from random stranger women even in your professional account’s inbox routinely, don’t even think of making your case. This tribe has made it almost impossible for women to express their frustrations with this daily dose of hatred hurled at them. This hatred has many forms, and what I received in my inbox is nothing but garden-variety sexual entitlement. It’s so common, happening day after day, inbox after inbox, that our senses ought to be numb towards it. But are they?

What’s even more frustrating—almost criminal—however, is that LinkedIn doesn’t even give an option for reporting harassment on its platform when you proceed to block and report someone. The reportage mechanism doesn’t even consider sexual harassment. Digital safety, oh joy! Is LinkedIn unaware of such incidents? Its jargon-heavy proclamations on members’ safety are almost laughable when there’s not even a mention of harassment faced by women. “How our content abuse defence systems work to keep members safe” — No, whatever your systems are, they have failed miserably in keeping your members safe.

Digital Safety And Censorship

The problem with the discourse on digital safety, mirroring physical safety, is that it is vitiated by censorship. The urge to curb and ban free speech is the default one for all digital safety purposes. Add to this mix the malafide political digital activity and let’s bid adieu to any real progress on making social media platforms safe. Women are the easiest victims to ignore everywhere, and digital space is no exception. 

Such is the psycho-social impact of not taking women seriously—socio-culturally, politically, economically, and at policy levels—that women themselves tend to believe in their second-class status. “What is the point?” Nothing screams despair louder than these four words. We are almost convinced that we do not matter. How does one even complain when the problem is not even recognised systemically? LinkedIn reporting process exemplifies it.  The platform’s social media help team reached out to me only after I made a public post. They bombarded me with links to file a complaint. I’ve done it. I’ve also been trying to lodge an FIR on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal, but it is glitching. The process is a punishment for the victim long before the culprit is even located.

Nobody Likes A Woman With A Voice

I once wrote a paper on how the Hellenistic division of oikos (private space) and polis (public space) doesn’t apply to women. Their oikos is also polis because they are denied a voice even in the oikos. This latest incident of sexual harassment is aimed precisely at that—breaking women from within when and where they expect it the least. We don’t want a woman with a voice, so we’ll weaponise her voice against her. I’ve only chosen to write about this incident and not all the others in the past just to assert one thing. 

Yes, we women are growing tired of resisting and revolting.
No, we won’t stop it just yet. Try breaking us some more. 

 (Nishtha Gautam is a Delhi-based author and academic.)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn laid off more than 500 employees, including engineers, on Monday in its second round of job cuts this year as the social media network grapples with a slowdown in hiring, a person familiar with the matter said.

The cuts, which affect 2.5% of the 20,000-strong staff, add to the tens of thousands of job losses this year in the technology sector amid an uncertain economic outlook.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Billionaire Elon Musk’s platform X (formerly Twitter) recently introduced a new job-hiring feature that allows verified organisations to post job listings on their profile. X has entered the domain of professional networking with a beta version of hiring, in a bid to challenge professional websites like LinkedIn.

Now, reacting to a post by a Twitter user, Ian Zelbo, who wrote, “Is there anything worse than LinkedIn?”

Replying to the post, the billionaire wrote on X, “People send me LinkedIn links sometimes, but the cringe level is so high that I just can’t bring myself to use it, so I ask for the resume or bio to be emailed. We will make sure that the X competitor to LinkedIn is cool.”

In another comment, Mr Musk wrote, “LinkedIn is actually the most cringe platform on the internet.”

See the post here:

People send me LinkedIn links sometimes, but the cringe level is so high that I just can’t bring myself to use it, so I ask for the resume or bio to be emailed.

We will make sure that the X competitor to LinkedIn is cool.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 27, 2023

The post soon went viral and social media users were quick to react. A user wrote, “The worst part is people just making things up! I’ve seen a lot of people use titles on LinkedIn that don’t even exist and couldn’t be further from what they actually do at the company. like – being responsible for something doesn’t make you “head of” it lol.”

“Make LinkedIn irrelevant. Did you know that they force the pronouns on everyone even if you don’t opt in for it? It’s hidden outside the US, of course, because they know it doesn’t fly elsewhere,” another user wrote.

“The App is as rigid as the old phones that never made it to this day,” the third user wrote.

Meanwhile, the billionaire hinted about introducing the job-hiring feature in May. In response to a user’s suggestion that Twitter includes dating services, Mr Musk said, “Interesting idea, maybe jobs too.” This also appears to be a step towards the platform becoming the everything app that Elon Musk previously stated.

As per a July report in TechCrunch, Twitter made its first acquisition since Mr Musk bought the platform, a job-matching tech start-up named Laskie in May. It is likely that the acquisition helped the company in creating and releasing the new feature. A US-based media company WorkWeek, has been using the feature for a month. Its CEO Adam Ryan took to the platform to share the new feature and took a dig at Mark Zuckerberg’s newly launched Twitter-rival Threads.