The strange case of Laibaah Ahmad Marri – by Sumantra Maitra
Cross-posted from TheLatest.com Citizen Journal
For the uninitiated, Laibaah Ahmad Marri is a US based, Baloch activist, who was suspended from Twitter. The interesting part is, she was suspended, for the “fourth” time, after being reported as a “bot”…even though she shows no characteristics of a bot, which I will come to later.
It started like this. I noticed hashtag #Laibaah trending in Twitter for sometime, and then came to know it belonged to an account, of a certain activist, named Laibaah Ahmad Marri. I interacted with her, and came to know that she holds pretty strong views about minority rights in Pakistan, and with her tweets successfully managed to rub a few Human Rights bigshots in Pakistan, the wrong way, and was also banned from Twitter thrice before.
The story itself was fascinating enough. And I personally have seen a lot of Human rights bigshots in my life due to the nature of my job, to know that they actually do nothing worthwhile, speak a lot of vague and polite balderdash, and get all the credit, and quite a lot of cash on all the hard work of junior level activists who actually slog on the roads motivated by ideology. So I asked her to write a guest post for me, about her earlier experience, which she wrote. The article was then republished in a Rights blog in Pakistan.
Now immediately after writing that post, within a day, she got suspended again from Twitter. Now, obviously she was not a bot, as I have exchanged emails with her, and she wrote me a whole post! But apparently Twitter editors don’t know or understand that. I saw some of her followers and friends in Twitter, tagging human rights and other free speech campaigners and organisations too in their tweets. I myself tagged Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in a couple of my tweet notifying them of this development, but I am sorry to say I never got a reply much less a retweet. Rather interestingly I came across a few questions about if anyone saw her personally, or that she is doing propaganda against the “Islamic Republic of Pakistan” just because she is a Baloch.
Obviously you can’t argue either with imbeciles or with racially and ideologically prejudiced people.
Now the questions that are unanswered are these. Is she a bot? No. Was she a spammer. No. Does anyone know her personally? Not that I know of. Does it matter? Most definitely no.
You don’t need to know anyone personally to ask about her guest post. You don’t need a photo identity to support someone’s idea or ideology. Was she for real? I don’t know, nor do I care. She may be a man, masquerading as a woman. What matters to me is the ideas she speaks of. She was definitely not a mechanical bot, uttering same lines over and over again. She was a human, speaking about something which she believes in. I guess that is reason enough NOT to ban her from Twitter, as Twitter is supposed to be a platform for common people propagating their views. If a commoner is banned, then the whole purpose comes crumbling down in a self-defeating way. If some bigshot feels uncomfortable enough by her tweets, he or she can block this person. That is within their right, though I doubt that will save them from the uncomfortable questions raised by the person blocked. No wonder bigshot sounds so eerily similar to bigots.
As of the Twitter editors, please check each complains on a case by case basis before banning or suspending anyone. Otherwise you are yourself being mechanical while dealing with mechanical bots.
LUBP kyun aik RAW agent, bot, ko Post kar raha hay? Mein ne suna hai Laibah Indian Agent hai. Khass kum jahan pak
Where is my friend Hamza Baloch, the Aafia Siddiqi lover who wanted to locate Laibaah in order to do with her what his friends did to Saleem Shahzad?
I too became interested in Laibaah’s case through some tweets on my timeline. Twitter really need to review their procedures.
I am actually shocked and dismayed on the insecurity of the socalled champions of human rights (Cowards), they couldn’t veven tolerate a voice that nudged them on twitter; so you can imagine what palate they have to accept dissent. It just shows there is a dearth of real activists. The ones who called Laibbah fake are themesleves fake in so many ways.
Laibaah called me an MQM agent. Then to try and back this up, she used LUBP posts where I commented asking how MQM target killers can be prosecuted.
Let me repeat that: to try and prove me as an MQM agent, she linked to posts where I asked for the prosecution of MQM’s target killers.
After pointing this out to her, I ended the conversation by calling her a dumb bitch.
Oh and comparing Ali Dayan Hasan to the founder of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is not a bad act of rhetoric, it’s only 70-80 dead bodies shy of being accurate.
Laibaah’s modus operandi: If 10 atrocities are committed and someone has the guts to stand up for 1 of them then she (or he) starts attacking that person for not standing up for the other 9 atrocities. After pestering them for a while, once she manages to get a reaction out of them, she presents that as proof that person is dishonest.
While her intentions may be good, her way of pestering people and calling them as agents is not. Even if the account is back, her attitude will get her blocked again.
And you really need to understand how twitter works: Twitter does not have “editors”, whenever an account is reported as spam by x number of people, that account is automatically blocked.
Majority of Laibaah’s supporters belong to ethnic and religious minorities of Pakistan, the Baloch, Hazara, Pashtun, Shia, Ahmadi etc.
Her opponents, less than a dozen, have these features:
1. Almost all of them are either Punjabi or Urdu speaking;
2. All of them are urban.
3. All of them are liberals, of course fake liberals.
The voice of resistance can never be stopped by banning!
@Haroon, put the ISI on a leash, I’ld applaud you for it, but don’t insult the cities, and I won’t insult the countryside. And I can point out to you, that this is Critical PPP, not Critical PONAM.
Jiye Zardari.
@Shaheryar, indeed.