ON AUGUST 5, 2024, a student-led uprising ended nearly 16 years of authoritarian rule in Bangladesh, forcing Sheikh Hasina to flee to India. For a brief moment, hope felt tangible — fear might recede, truth could be spoken freely, and reporting would no longer demand personal sacrifice. Yet transitions are rarely simple.
From 2010 to August 4, 2024, journalists faced killings, enforced disappearances, and arrests. Photographer Shahidul Alam was detained for over 100 days; journalist Shafiqul Islam Kajol was jailed after having disappeared; 17-year-old Khadijatoul Kobra was imprisoned simply for speaking the truth. Writer and entrepreneur Mushtaq Ahmed died in custody, and cartoonist Ahmed Kabir Kishore was also tortured and jailed. I, too, faced threats, censorship, and blacklisting. Many others have faced different forms of repression — detailing all their stories would make this account far longer. The cost of integrity was real — silence, exile, and loss.
After August 5, what was meant to be a period of free journalism in Bangladesh quickly met with a new, invisible weapon designed to silence us. Journalists increasingly faced cyberbullying, character assassination, false accusations, and targeted online tagging — most notably being branded ‘anti-Islam’. These tactics deliberately amplified social hostility alongside political pressure, making reporting in an already fragile democracy far more dangerous. I have experienced this firsthand.
One real incident illustrates the situation clearly: two women were taken into custody after being confronted by locals for smoking in public. When I questioned why women were being harassed for an act that falls within their rights and why different standards apply to men and women, my image was distorted into a photocard portraying me with a cigarette. An online mob campaign then falsely branded me a smoker, aimed solely at silencing me from raising such critical questions again. In another instance, a woman was harassed by a librarian for not wearing her scarf ‘properly’. When student political groups intervened under alleged police instructions, I questioned whether politically affiliated groups, rather than law enforcement, should address such harassment.
In the post-uprising period, Bangladesh has also shown disturbing societal drift. An accused harasser was welcomed with flowers in court — a stark signal of how normalised impunity can erode public respect for rights. Women journalists, caught at the intersection of gendered scrutiny, political hostility, and digitally amplified intimidation, remain particularly vulnerable.
Journalists and political analysts who pose tough questions to some right-wing organisations face harassment and attacks from coordinated online mobs. I have received online threats explicitly calling for me to be gang-raped. Such attacks highlight dangers the state still fails to confront. Online mobs operate without borders, often faceless and anonymous, and can turn journalists into legitimate targets for real-world violence.
Global experience underscores this risk. Daphne Caruana Galizia, Malta’s investigative journalist, endured years of online vilification before being assassinated by a car bomb in 2017. In India, Gauri Lankesh — who once challenged her peers by asking, ‘If you big guys can’t take a stronger stand, how are we going to do it?’ — was a vocal critic of Hindu right-wing politics and majoritarianism. She faced sustained threats and online abuse from right-wing extremist groups, was branded ‘anti-national’, and was ultimately shot dead outside her home in 2017. In the Philippines, Maria Ressa has long faced coordinated online harassment alongside legal persecution, with digital attacks systematically deployed to discredit her work and obstruct her journalism.
These cases show that online threats are not merely rhetorical — they often precede real-world harm, normalise hostility, erode public empathy, and expand the boundaries of what society comes to tolerate. The pattern is clear: discredit the journalist, isolate them, and then make the unthinkable appear justified.
The most dangerous aspect of this threat is its invisibility. It is continuous, rarely documented, and frequently unseen by the public. Most threats come from anonymous or fake accounts, making accountability difficult. Yet its impact rivals any state machinery of repression. This is a crime that often goes unreported — forcing victims into silence, and that silence is dangerous.
To counter it, the government must act proactively. Authorities should enforce accountability for online and offline threats, collaborate with social media platforms to trace and penalise perpetrators, and ensure the protection of journalists — particularly women — so that independent reporting can survive and thrive in a genuinely free Bangladesh.
As Hannah Arendt warned, ‘The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.’ In Bangladesh today, the growing acceptance of intimidation, harassment, and online attacks against journalists signals a perilous drift away from that empathy. If a society begins to tolerate the silencing of truth-tellers, it risks not only constraining press freedom but also eroding the moral and democratic foundations upon which it stands.
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Kazi Jesin is a journalist and political commentator.
