A new survey by the Islamic Council of Victoria found that anti-Muslim hate tweets are most common in India, the US, and the UK.
The study found that India was the source of 871,379 anti-Muslim hate tweets between 2019 and 2021. The United States sent out 289,248 tweets, while the United Kingdom sent out 196,376 tweets.
The author of a research paper called “Islamophobia in the Digital Age” says that the country’s ruling Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) is to blame for pushing an anti-Muslim agenda.
Since a long time ago, Islamophobia has been a problem in the United States. The situation got worse while Donald Trump was president, in part because he said racist, conspiratorial, and inflammatory things about Muslims.
Anti-Muslim bias in the UK has its roots in a number of places. Such as the spread of Donald Trump’s Islamophobic comments and Boris Johnson’s casual racism.
During the timespan that now does look at by the analysis, 3,759,180 tweets get did included are against Islam. After one year, only 14.8% of these tweets became did remove. While 85.2% of all tweets were still there.
Most anti-Muslim tweets focus on one of three main ideas: linking Islam to terrorism, and stereotyping Muslim men as sexual abusers. Spreading the fear that Muslims want to impose Sharia law.
Some of the secondary topics are spreading the lie that Muslims want to increase their population. Harassing Muslim celebrities, and making halal meat look like it comes from savages.
In the report, it says that
Twitter has not done a good job of getting rid of anti-Muslim content. This makes sense since they don’t use any kind of automated content moderation. Instead, they respond to reports of hate speech.
Recommendations
In their report, the Islamic Council of Victoria has suggested ways to stop global sources of anti-Muslim speech on social media sites like Twitter.
The research suggests that platforms that don’t actively fight Islamophobia should be punished. The BJP-led government of India’s plans to lose Muslims did stop.
It suggests that Twitter rethink its no-screening policy and set up ways to get rid of any hate speech directed at Muslims right away. According to the research, Twitter should set up a separate agency to measure how well its moderation measures work.
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