Does being real online actually get you hate?

Growing up in Khushab and finding the internet

The episode opens with By Rooj tracing her path from Khushab — a small district in Punjab — to Karachi, and eventually to a public presence online. She describes herself as someone who came from a background where even having a full-face profile picture on Facebook felt like a statement. The women around her, she recalls, kept their display pictures as flowers or leaves. Going further than that — posting photos, sharing opinions, eventually talking about her life — was not a natural progression. It was a series of small decisions made against a backdrop of social expectation.

She was in intermediate science classes when she first started using Facebook seriously, and later Instagram. The early content was not strategic. She was taking photographs on chart paper, experimenting with colour combinations, and posting them because she found the process satisfying. There was no audience in mind. The audience came later, and with it, a different set of pressures.

Medical school, mental health, and finding a reason to post

By Rooj got admission into a medical and dental college, and it was there that the content shifted. She started talking about the struggles of being a medical student — the workload, the isolation, the particular texture of hostel life away from family. She describes going through a period of major depression and finding that when she posted about it, the response was immediate and overwhelming. People wrote to her saying they felt the same way but could not talk to anyone about it.

“I put so much effort into your content,” she says at one point, describing the investment she made in what she shared — not just the production side, but the emotional exposure involved in posting about mental health when most people around her were not doing that. The response validated the effort. But it also created a new kind of responsibility she had not anticipated.

The Instagram algorithm and the death of organic reach

Muzamil raises the question of what happens when the platform stops working for you. By Rooj describes a specific moment when Instagram’s algorithm changed and her reach collapsed almost overnight. She had been building steadily, and then the numbers simply stopped moving. She describes it as the content dying — not because the content had changed, but because the platform had changed what it chose to show.

This section of the conversation is less about personal experience and more about structure. The algorithm, By Rooj explains, incentivises certain kinds of content — content that generates fast engagement, that provokes reaction, that keeps people on the platform. Honest, considered content does not always do that. The result is that creators who post real things are, in a structural sense, working against the platform’s interests. She describes this as a tension she has never fully resolved.

What hate actually means

Muzamil asks By Rooj directly about hate — what it feels like, how she processes it. Her answer is more nuanced than a simple account of hurt feelings. She says that when hate comes, it often means you are doing something that registers. “Hate is very bad to feel,” she says, but she has come to understand it as a signal rather than a verdict. The people who receive no reaction at all are, in some ways, more invisible than the people who receive negative ones.

She also talks about the generational gap in understanding online hate. Her relatives and older friends, when they found out people were saying bad things about her online, struggled to understand why she would continue. Their instinct was to stop — to remove yourself from the situation. Her instinct, developed over years of being online, was different. She had learned to separate the comment from the commenter, and the commenter from any real knowledge of her life.

Responsibility and the limits of a public platform

This is where the conversation becomes most substantive. By Rooj and Muzamil spend considerable time on the question of what responsibility looks like for someone with a public platform. She is clear that having followers does not make you a journalist or an activist, but it does mean that what you say reaches people you cannot see and cannot predict.

She describes learning, over time, to think before posting — not to self-censor, but to ask whether a particular post sends a message she actually intends to send. “I know now which opinions to share publicly and which not to,” she says. Six years earlier, she adds, she did not have that awareness. She would share things without thinking about how they might land with someone in a different situation.

Muzamil pushes on this. He asks whether responsibility becomes a kind of performance — whether the pressure to be responsible ends up flattening the honesty that made the content worth following in the first place. By Rooj does not fully resolve this tension. She acknowledges it. The answer she arrives at is something like: you develop a sense of what is yours to say and what is not, and that sense gets sharper with time, but it never becomes automatic.

The difference between you online and you in real life

Later in the discussion, By Rooj talks about the confusion audiences develop between the person they follow and the person who actually exists. She describes receiving messages from followers who felt they knew her — who were surprised or hurt when she did not respond in the way they expected, or when she expressed an opinion that did not match the version of her they had constructed.

“People want to understand the difference between you on the internet and you in real life,” she says, “and they get confused.” She is not critical of this confusion — she understands it. But she is clear that the confusion is the audience’s to manage, not hers to prevent by making herself smaller or more consistent than she actually is.

She also talks about the specific experience of being a girl from a small town who became visible online. The social cost of that visibility is different from what someone from a larger city might face. The people who knew her before she had followers had a particular set of expectations. When she exceeded them — in reach, in candour, in the topics she was willing to discuss — some of those relationships became complicated.

Speaking on difficult topics and the cost of staying quiet

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil and By Rooj arrive at the question of whether creators have an obligation to speak on difficult topics — political events, social injustice, things that are happening in the world. By Rooj’s position is careful. She does not believe that having a platform creates an obligation to comment on everything. But she does believe that staying quiet on something you actually care about, because you are afraid of the reaction, is its own kind of cost.

“Speaking the truth is never easy at any time,” she says, drawing on a broader point about the difficulty of saying what you believe in front of people who may not agree. She describes the feeling of saying something you believe in a room where most people disagree — the discomfort of it, but also the energy that comes from not having suppressed it.

Muzamil closes the conversation by noting that the process of becoming someone who can speak honestly in public is not something that happens at once. It is slow, and it is shaped by every interaction — every piece of hate received, every message from someone who said the content helped them, every moment of deciding whether to post or not. By Rooj agrees. She says she is still in that process. She does not think it ends.