- Friday, April 19, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
HATE speech targeting the Hindu community has been growing across various social media platforms, a report uploaded this week by researchers at the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) at the Rutgers University in New Jersey, the US, has said.
The authors of the report analysed the hate messages and among them were a million tweets, allegedly from Iranian trolls that disseminated anti-Hindu stereotypes to “fuel division as part of an influence campaign to accuse Hindus of perpetrating a genocide against minorities in India”, ThePrint said in a report.
The makes of the report compiled data from the social media platforms between January 2019 and June 2022 and saw that therfe has been a surge in “derogatory posts” against the Hindus on social media platforms such as 4chan, Telegram and Gab over the years in the form of anti-Hindu memes, slogans, etc.
Use of signals on “Hinduphobic” code words and memes reached record highs and it was feared that they could spill over into the real world, especially at a time when religious tension and violence is high in India, the US university report said.
The authors also cited the barbaric murder of a Hindu tailor in the city of Udaipur by two self-radicalised Muslim men in the western Indian state of Rajasthan in June.
The report compared the Hinduphobia to Antisemitism and said, “Indeed, as this report outlines, in a manner similar to Antisemitism, today’s Hinduphobia exploits tropes that are centuries old to reignite hatred”.
The researchers put together a range of material they found in their data collection — from ethnic slurs to memes proposing the same fate for Hindus as for George Floyd — an African-American whose murder by a police officer in the US in 2020 sparked massive protests globally — to “anti-Hindu genocidal memes” and memes mocking the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai.
“We also show that the percolation of Hinduphobia into general online discourse is used by a variety of both established and emergent actors for political purposes. In particular, we show that state actors within Iran often weaponise this discourse to ignite conflict between India and Pakistan. The weaponisation of Hinduphobia for facially political aims in the real world poses a tangible threat to ratchet anti-Hindu violence,” the researchers wrote in the report.
The authors said that by educating people to identify these threats via open source, the NCRI was “empowering” the next generation with the tools to tackle such threats.
