Twitter can be a great place for staying up to date in the goings on around the world, but in spite of the fact that this is the case it has also become a bit of a hub for extremist ideas. Radicals of various origins turn to Twitter to spout their ideologies because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up making them more widespread, and Islamophobia is becoming a particularly notorious issue on that front.
According to a study conducted by the Islamic Council of Victoria, around 85% of posts that are inciting hatred towards Muslim communities across the globe come from three nations, namely India, the US as well as the UK. India is the recipient of the dubious honor of most Islamophobic country on Twitter, with over 870,000 hateful tweets coming from that nation in just two years. The US came in second with 289,000, followed by the UK with 196,000.
Much of the rise of Islamophobia in India can be attributed to the ruling BJP political party, which has been known for using anti-Muslim rhetoric to gain power. The BJP has also collaborated quite openly with various extremist Hindu organizations and helped to further their agenda, such as the Hindu nationalist organization known as the RSS.
As for the US, Islamophobia became a major issue there in the fallout of the pandemic. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that the rise of Donald Trump to the presidency made matters much worse than they already were. Much like Narendra Modi of the BJP, Trump used inflammatory rhetoric to drum up votes, and members of the Muslim community were among his most popular targets with all things having been considered and taken into account.
Moving on to the UK, this nation has seen a similar rise in its staunch 21st century Islamophobia in the nationalist environment of the Post Brexit landscape. Recently ousted Boris Johnson also contributed to this with his casual racism, although he did not take as much of a heavy handed approach as his counterpart across the Atlantic.
While the people that make these hateful posts should be held accountable, Twitter also shares some of the responsibility for not doing as much as it could have. The ICV noted 3.75 million posts of an Islamophibic nature between 2019 and 2021. Less than 15% of these posts, or 14.8% to be precise, were removed. That means that 85% of them are still up for the world to see, so clearly Twitter is failing to mitigate the rising tide of Islamophobia on its website.
Additionally, the organization conducting this research noted that only 3% of tweets that were flagged as Islamophobic ended up being removed. That is making the problem worse than might have been the case otherwise, and Twitter needs to step up otherwise it will become a hostile environment to an already beleaguered and disadvantaged Muslim population. Conspiracy theories, calls to violence and numerous other types of Islamophobia abound on the platform, and this problem will continue to worsen if Twitter doesn’t take action.
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