“I don’t want my story or the way my headline was written and the backlash it got to be a prime example for immigrants to not tell their stories,” says Sumyrah Khan.
On the morning of 1 July, Sumyrah Khan was getting ready for work when her phone began to buzz, she says.
“It was like 7am,” she said recently.
Someone from the Labour Party – she is a member – had messaged her about an article in the Irish Times’s “New To The Parish” column, featuring Khan.
“And I saw the headline and my stomach just dropped,” she said.
The headline? “From India to Ireland: ‘I was cleaning toilets in a bar and the next week I was in Leinster House.’”
To some, it sounded like she was a cleaner in India, and once she arrived in Ireland, she was magically welcomed into Leinster House – blurring out her hard work as a young adult navigating the immigration system and Ireland’s housing and cost of living crises, says Khan.
“It made it seem like Maid in Manhattan, you know, the Jennifer Lopez movie?”
Khan ran downstairs and called her best friend to vent, she says.
Then she emailed the reporter. At about 11am, they responded to say they didn’t have control over the headline, says Khan. (Most reporters don’t get to write their headlines.)
“Between 7am and 11am I was in sheer panic,” says Khan.
She sent out emails to a few different Irish Times addresses, Khan says. A couple of hours slipped by, and the newspaper changed the headline.
By then, the Irish Times had shared the story with the initial headline on Facebook twice.
It collected anti-immigrant comments, some invoking the Great Replacement conspiracy theory – the idea that there’s a conscious effort to replace White people with immigrants of colour.
The article itself was fine, says Khan, mostly direct quotes of the things she had said. But full access to it was blocked by a paywall.
Media academics say that as paywalls become more common in the search for means to sustain the press, headlines and short snippets are, more than ever, all some people will see of a story.
This heightens responsibility for those writing headlines, traditionally tasked with framing stories in a way that provokes and draws readers in, they say.
Adding to the complexities is a transformed social-media landscape in which companies are paring back human moderation and allowing more of a free-for-all.
A 2024 paper by American researchers published in the journal Current Opinion in Psychology says that in the social media of today, “the content that drives the most engagement is often from a minority of extreme (and often hostile) users”.
These users, it says, a “non-representative minority”, distort others’ perception of what constitutes socially acceptable behaviour offline.
A spokesperson for the Irish Times did not respond to queries sent on 17 July, including one asking about the organisation’s views on sharing provocative headlines about immigrants in adversarial online spaces.
Some commenting on Khan’s story assumed she’d sought asylum and been granted refugee status – “They prioritise refugees over their own citizens.”
That immigrants are getting a leg up over people born here is a common anti-immigrant talking point. Some used the headline to feed that view.
But Khan arrived here with a student visa.
She hustled hard, she says, juggling scraping-by jobs like waiting tables at a bar, and other part-time gigs as a student, and after, until she found a sponsoring employer with a full-time job that qualified for a work permit.
Non-EU graduates of Irish universities have to seek employment and a work permit sponsor quickly before their graduate immigration permission expires, or else they have to leave.
Khan says she is grateful to the Irish Times for the platform it offered.
But its headline, which was all that many readers saw, could have told a better story of her triumph against the twists and turns of immigrant life in an expensive, unfamiliar city, she says.
That the headline also could be read as demeaning the job of a cleaner didn’t sit right with her, says Khan.
“I don’t want to discredit the actual job of, you know, cleaning toilets, I don’t have any shame in that, in any way.”
She’d said that to the Irish Times reporter, she says, to show how surreal working at Leinster House felt. She didn’t know it was going to be used to sum her up, says Khan.
The Leinster House job is a reference to her work as a youth and equality officer for the Labour Party.
Besides, Khan says, she waited tables in a bar, and cleaning bathrooms was just one of her duties, and she’d said that in the interview.
Niamh Kirk, associate professor of journalism at the University of Limerick (UL), says she’d seen Khan’s story.
She didn’t like the headline, Kirk says. “I hate to say it, but it did seem to be a very clumsily written headline.”
The article’s framing is one of agency and empowerment, says Kirk. But the paywall means many won’t see that, she says.
For her, it speaks to broader problems with narrowing access to professional reporting, and its impact on media literacy, says Kirk.
“The fact that journalism says we need paywalls to be sustainable doesn’t mean that there are not serious social consequences for cutting off the availability of news,” she says.
Beyond all that, headline writers are always told to write in a way that makes audiences flock to a story, she says.
Eileen Culloty, deputy director of the Dublin City University (DCU) Institute for Media, Democracy, and Society, says the initial headline on Khan’s story did exactly that.
It’s “well crafted to provoke a response and clicks and shares on social media”, she said.
Every organisation needs to sustain itself, says Kirk, the UL journalism professor, but the existence of paywalls elevates responsibility.
Also, “journalism should recognise that people do not necessarily fully engage in reading these stories even when it’s free”, she said.
Aidan O’Brien, researcher and policy analyst at the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) Ireland, an independent project supporting communities to combat disinformation, says extremist accounts latch onto anything that can be misinterpreted to stoke rage.
He points to how, last year, anti-immigrant hardliners edited clips from an RTÉ show to make it look like a mum born elsewhere was bragging about getting a council rental, after an Irish mum had been talking about her struggles being homeless.
In reality, she and her child had experienced homelessness and applied like everyone else, and she had spoken first of her relief in getting a home – rather than talking about that in response to the Irish mum’s story.
The media has to take all the malice out there into account, says O’Brien.
The 2024 study on current social media, published in the journal Current Opinion in Psychology, highlights the outsized influence of a small pool of hyper-vocal extremist accounts in ways that spill out into the real world.
“Research on social media has found that, while only 3% of active accounts are toxic, they produce 33% of all content.
Not only does this extreme minority stir discontent, spread misinformation, and spark outrage online, they also bias the metaperceptions of most users who passively “lurk” online,” it says.
Exposure to their commentary can normalise behaviours that are considered anti-social offline, the paper says, because “people encode the social norms from posts and comments in online forums and social media platforms”, it says.
O’Brien, at the EDMO, says newspapers have to envision the “most maligned” interpretation of a headline and work from there.
He can understand that it goes against traditional perceptions around story framing and audience attraction for some, O’Brien says.
“And I appreciate the urge to go for that punchy dramatic headline, but it’s doing your readers and your subjects a disservice,” he says.
There’s always been a power imbalance between the media and the people it represents, says Culloty, at DCU.
“The ethical question is about whether media producers set people up for a backlash or whether people who put themselves forward should know better,” she said.
It’s the kind of thing you can’t really regulate, Culloty says.
Khan says she and the Irish Times reporter did not discuss expectations and potential backlash before the story was published.
“I don’t think they anticipated it either,” she said.
Kirk, at UL, sees a solution in having clear, transparent guidelines in representing marginalised people.
But more than anything, she wants to see immigrant stories told by reporters from immigrant communities and a rise in “diasporic media”.
Different communities shouldn’t rely on the Irish Times to be their voices and always understand their experiences and perspectives, said Kirk.
Generally, “There’s a need in Ireland for self-representation. Having middle-class Irish Dublin journalists talking about the impact of racism, that’s not self-representative,” she said.
Khan says she’s grown stoic about the comments under her story.
She realises, she says, that they weren’t about her personally. Just that she embodies any immigrant who refuses to shrink and disappear, she says. “Visibility is political.”
Even a picture of someone who is not White draws toxic commentary on the Irish Times’s X account.
In response to an article from 14 July about a raffle to win tickets to a food festival, featuring a photo of a chef who doesn’t look White, someone said a derogatory variation of how they wouldn’t eat what his hands had touched.
Khan’s story on the Irish Times’s X account, even with a new headline, – “From India to Ireland: ‘The first day I came to Dublin, I felt like I’m home, like I belong’” – got lots of comments repeating hateful tropes about Indian people.
Khan says she’s no problem with that new headline, though, and wouldn’t have complained if they’d run the story with it from the start.
O’Brien, the EDMO researcher, says that for X in particular, he personally thinks media companies should do the right thing and abandon it. “My personal opinion is that it is a toxic environment, and I’m concerned about media capitulation.”
“It seems quite strange that most media organisations haven’t left X, to be honest,” he says.
A spokesperson for the Irish Times did not respond to a query asking if it would consider closing comments on stories about vulnerable people on loosely moderated platforms, to protect their sources.
Khan says she’s worried some immigrants saw the initial framing of her story and the comments underneath it, and decided to steer clear of the media and go unseen.
Even her local barista, who is Brazilian, brought it up, she says. “He said, ‘I didn’t read the article, but I saw the comment section and it was horrible.’”
We don’t need fewer immigrant stories, Khan says, but ones that are better told.
“I don’t want my story or the way my headline was written and the backlash it got to be a prime example for immigrants to not tell their stories,” she said.
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