GALI BOYS: Inside the world of the online hate-click industry

Shubham Mishra & Umesh Dada belong to a tribe of influencers who’ve made a career out of abuse

- Sonam Joshi & Ketaki Desai

• Three young men sitting in a car talk gleefully talk about raping a young TikToker in explicit detail and how they are attracted to her. Before they begin the video, they announce that ‘good’ women and children shouldn’t watch the video because its contents are like a “blue film”.

• A young man names a Congress leader (who is Muslim) and says that he should be brought out onto the streets and beaten. The video is littered with the choicest expletives.

These are some of the videos made by YouTubers Shubham Mishra and Umesh Dada, who were arrested this week for rape threats against comedian Agrima Joshua with rape. While it was their videos targeting Joshua that got them national headlines, the duo is part of a tribe of angry young men who have built up a substantial online following by peddling ‘hate clicks’, or content that provokes and riles up the audience.

Positioning themselves as self-designated custodians of Indian culture, they wag their fingers at women, liberals, minorities, TikTok stars, queer people, Bollywood actors and producers, and anyone they label as being against the country, like in the case of the TikToker and politician above.

Vadodara resident Mishra, 26, who had almost 300k subscribers on YouTube, is a Class 11 drop-out who refers to himself as a “social worker”. His videos featured him sitting in his car, yelling and finger-wagging at whoever the target of the week was.