Helle Lyng Svendsen faces online harassment after questioning India’s prime minister

Helle Lyng Svendsen, a commentator for the Norwegian newspaper Dagsavisen, has faced a wave of online harassment after posing a question to India’s prime minister during a press conference in Oslo.

During a press event on May 18, Svendsen asked Narendra Modi why he would not take questions from “the freest press in the world.” Instead of a response, she received a surge of online abuse, including threats, deepfake images, and sexually explicit content.

The video of her question has since been viewed more than 11 million times on X. Svendsen told Dagbladet that the reaction was “very surreal.”

Her social media inbox has been flooded with messages, including hundreds from Indian media outlets seeking interviews. However, she has also received AI-generated images and sexually explicit material falsely attributed to her, including content distributed on pornographic websites.

“I was shocked,” Svendsen said. “This is the kind of thing you read can happen to people, and then suddenly it’s happening to you. It’s very strange when the starting point was just asking a journalistic question.”

She has also considered whether the response would have been different had a man posed the same question. “I’ve wondered if the same thing would have happened if a man had spoken up like this,” she said. “It feels like the sexualized content is being used to discredit me.”

Svendsen described receiving messages containing sexualized threats, including some that wished her to be raped. “There’s a lot of underlying sexual violence in the messages,” she said. “People write that they hope I get raped, and things like that.”

Despite the abuse, she said she does not take all the messages literally and feels safe in Norway. “In Norway, it’s business as usual,” she said. “I walk around as before, and I haven’t noticed anything here. Norwegians take it completely in stride.”

She added that she may avoid traveling to India in the near future.

Svendsen also faced disruptions to her social media accounts. She was temporarily locked out of her Facebook account after the video spread, which she described as “one of the worst parts” of the experience. She could log into Instagram but could not read messages or scroll through her feed.

“It shows how vulnerable you are when something suddenly explodes internationally,” she said. “Suddenly it spreads globally, and you’re left trying to regain access to your own accounts.”

Svendsen previously worked as a U.S. correspondent for Nettavisen and said the experience prepared her for harsh reactions from political supporters. “I think I became a bit hardened during my time in the U.S.,” she said. “You get used to pretty harsh reactions when covering politics there.”