New York: The United Nations strongly urged the global community to “take all necessary measures” to fight discrimination against Muslims. They have asked the community to “prohibit any advocacy of religious hatred that constitutes incitement to violence”.
UN declared Anti-Islamophobia Day on 15 March due to the Pakistan’s efforts is an appreciable step howeve, much more has to be done by the world and tech companies. As per study carried out by Asian Peace, users from the three countries generated 86 % of malicious content between 2017-19; online hateful content led to physical attacks on Muslims and mosques.
India is now an extremist society with barely any semblance of secularism and democracy as Hindu supremacist RSS and BJP have tightened control over state organs. In India, ruling party BJP was responsible for the dissemination and amplification of anti-Muslim hate. Now approx 55.12% of anti-Muslim hatred tweets originate from India.
As per study by the Islamic Council of Victoria, Australia found nearly four million anti-Muslim posts made during a 24-month period between 2017 and 2019. In the US, the proliferation of anti-Muslim hate on Twitter is almost inseparable from Muslim immigration ban and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories during previous government.
As for the UK, researchers attributed the prevalence of anti-Muslim tweets to a multitude of factors, including the global reach of Trump’s anti-Muslim animus, anti-immigration sentiments sparked by the refugee crisis, and the discourse surrounding Brexit, along with the casual racism of former PM Boris Johnson, who once compared niqab-wearing Muslim women to “letter boxes”. Researchers were able to identify several key themes riding the posts from three countries, i.e., association of Islam with terrorism, depiction of Muslims as perpetrators of sexual violence, the fear of Sharia on others. Muslim immigrants are replacing white in the West and Hindus in India, and declaring “halal” as an inhumane practice that typifies the so-called “barbarity” of Islam.
The 2019 Christchurch Mosque attack is illustrative of this vicious cycle. The gunman was radicalized by anti-Muslim online content, and in the week after he murdered 52 Muslim worshippers, incidents of anti-Muslim abuse spiked upwards by a staggering 1300 % in New Zealand, 600 % in the UK. Twitter, Google and Meta launched special efforts as part of a “shared commitment to counter hateful conduct online, however have failed so far.
Twitter has failed to remove 3759,180 anti-Muslim tweets (posted between Aug 19 and Aug 21), which have done little or nothing to remove anti-Muslim content from their platforms. Only 15% tweets were removed (557,446 were taken down). This inaction is having a devastating impact on Muslim minority communities throughout the world, with the microblogging site Twitter becoming a primary source for the proliferation. Web Desk
