Teen Queer Dies Of Suicide After Receiving Hate Comments On Instagram: Report
Pranshu, a 16-year-old queer artist from Madhya Pradesh’s Ujjain died by suicide. The tragic incident happened after receiving thousands of hate crimes for an Instagram reel the teenager has posted, as per a report.
Pranshu was a tenth-grade student and wanted to be identified as a girl. The student’s mother Preeti and father Rajendra Yadav separated three years back. He used to live his mother who is a medical representative. She was at work while Pranshu hanged himself by using her dupatta, said Free Press Journal.
Pranshu was a self-taught make up artist and have an Instagram handle about make up and beauty contents. The Instagram page was named as ‘glamitupwithparnshu’ and had around 16,500 followers.
Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju, an actor from web series Made In Heaven, posted Pranshu’s picture on Instagram claiming the reason behind the tragic incident to be the hate comments flooded on Pranshu’s page after posting a Transition video in saree on the occasion of Diwali.
In her post, the actor claimed about the video receiving 4000+ hate comments from “number of profiles educated or otherwise, dedicated to humiliating queer and trans folk”. She said “the hashtag #JusticeForPranshu shows no posts, because some apparently violate community guidelines”.
She further added that, several times such incidents of hate comments against the queer community has happened before and they had file complaint against the same to Meta, the parent company of Instagram and such platforms.
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S. Gehlot, who is in charge said the exact reason for the suicide is yet to be confirmed and a probe is ordered on the matter, and they are checking Pranshu’s mobile.
A former Meta executive, who quit his job in 2021, Arthur Bejar said that Instagram is “fundamentally misleading” the public about the safety of the platform for teens and told US Senators that Instagram is “categorically not” appropriate for the teenagers, as reported by NDTV.
