Kuala Lampur, Sept. 27 -- Thirty seconds of dialogue. That's all it took.

"I'm Tamil. My family's from Sri Lanka."

Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, 24, said it as a character in a Netflix comedy about a college dance team. It wasn't a speech or a protest. It was a throwaway line in a scene nobody would remember.

Within days, Sinhala nationalist Facebook pages were telling their followers to rate Best of the Best one star, with no need to watch it. One page gave out a ready-made prompt so ChatGPT or Gemini could write the abuse for them, then demanded screenshots as proof. The rating fell so sharply that IMDb posted a warning: unusual voting activity.

Read that again. Grown adults were so threatened by a young woman saying her own name that they...