Extremists Spread Hate and Violence Through Social Media

An article in the Washington Post brings to light a brand of extremism running rampant through Facebook in India, driven by the catchphrase “love jihad.”

Young Hindu woman was alerted by text of a hate post threatening her safety and that of her boyfriend.
A young Hindu woman was alerted by text of a hate post threatening her and the Muslim man she was dating (Shutterstock.com)

The article describes a 21-year-old Hindu college student receiving a text that she and her Muslim boyfriend had been targeted publicly on Facebook along with about 100 interfaith couples—Muslim men and their Hindu girlfriends. The Facebook post read: “This is a list of girls who have become victims of love jihad. We urge all Hindu lions to find and hunt down all the men mentioned here.”

The term love jihad “is meant to inflame dark fears that Muslim men who woo Hindu women might be trying to convert them to Islam—a prejudice that the Hindu right has tried to stoke for nearly a decade. But use of the term has spread on social media with the rise of the Hindu nationalist party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, at a time when religious hatred is growing on Facebook in India, its largest market,” reports the Washington Post’s Annie Gowen.

The article continues: “Civil society groups have charged that Facebook has not acted quickly enough in such instances to curb the hate speech that inflamed tensions throughout Asia, including Muslim-Buddhist riots in Sri Lanka and Burma’s exodus of more than 850,000 Rohingya Muslims into Bangladesh. Facebook was dubbed the “beast” in that crisis by a United Nations monitor.

“In India, a March study by the Observer Research Foundation, a think tank based in New Delhi, showed that religion is increasingly used as a basis of hate speech on Facebook, a jump of 19 to 30 percent between 2016 and 2017.”

The full article is available online.


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