Thursday, April 25, 2024

Hinduphobia on Social Media: How Islamists do it is alarming

Members of the Network Contagion Lab at Rutgers University-New Brunswick (NC Lab), found evidence of a sharp rise and evolving patterns of hate speech directed toward the Hindu community across numerous social media platforms, according to a new report.

Anti-Hindu Disinformation: A Case Study of Hinduphobia on Social Media” details how white supremacist and 4chan genocidal Pepe memes about Hindus are being shared prolifically within extremist Islamist web networks on messaging service Telegram and elsewhere.

Researchers at the Rutgers NC Lab used artificial intelligence to better understand the development of a disguised and coded language pattern shared on social networks. According to their analysis of 1 million tweets, Iranian trolls disseminated anti-Hindu stereotypes to fuel division as part of an influence campaign to accuse Hindus of perpetrating a genocide against minorities in India.

In July the signal on the Hinduphobic code words and memes reached record highs that could inflame a spill out to real world violence, especially in light of escalating religious tensions in India and the recent beheading of an Indian shopkeeper. Social media platforms largely are unaware of the code words, key images, and structured nature of this hatred even as it is surging.

In a series of tweets, Network Contagion Research Institute makes some alarming findings public. 

“Hinduphobic tropes — such as the portrayal of Hindus as fundamentally heretical evil, dirty, tyrannical, genocidal, irredeemable or disloyal— are prominent across the ideological spectrum and are being deployed by fringe web communities and state actors alike, ” says one of the tweet. 

White Supremacist and Islamist communities refer to Indians as “pajeets” on fringe web platforms (4chan, gab). This is rapidly growing on mainstream communities too.

Using Word2Vec, a Natural Language Processing Algorithm, we find the word associations with “pajeet” are derogatory characterizations, says another tweet. 

Sample this: Our qualitative analysis suggests that pajeet is used in reference to Hindus & Indians interchangeably, with majority of derogatory characterizations targeted towards Hindus. Distinctly Hindu symbols are used in memes referencing pajeet, and not other Indian religions.

Below are memes associated with pajeet found on Twitter, openly calling to violently kill Hindus. Extremists use memes to suggest a repeat of the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, Nazi style executions & co-opt the murder of George Floyd to suggest the same should be done to Hindus.

And this: The Chabad Synagogue shooter in 2019, had referenced “pajeets” in the manifesto. It has also been used in white nationalist podcasts about murderous fantasies about Indians

During the March 2017 Bhopal–Ujjain Passenger train bombing by ISIS, Iranian trolls, pretending to be Pakistani, attempted a disinformation campaign to suggest that the attack was done by “Hindu Extremists,” and attempted to get it trending.

In addition to extremist groups and fringe web communities, state actors also deploy anti-Hindu tropes as part of information operations for geopolitical influence. The Network Contagion Research Institute  uncovered an influence operation by state sponsored Iranian trolls who pretended to be Pakistani users

“There is, unfortunately, nothing new to the bigotry and violence faced by the Hindu population,” said John J. Farmer Jr., director of both the Miller Center and the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. “What is new is the social media context in which hate messages are being shared. Our prior work has shown a correlation between the intensity of hate messaging over social media and the eruption of real-world acts of violence.”

Student analysts like Prasiddha Sudhakar worked with high school students from the New Jersey Governors’ STEM Scholars program to assemble and analyze the data. They taught them about cyber social threat detection through machine learning, open-source intelligence gathering and the dimensions of anti-Hindu disinformation.

“I appreciate the opportunity to bring awareness to this underrepresented subject matter,” said Sudhakar, who graduated from Rutgers in May with a double major in computer science and economics and minor in critical intelligence studies.

“Educating young people on how to detect open-source hate messaging is a vital first step in helping vulnerable communities prepare for and respond to emerging threats,” said Joel Finkelstein, chief data scientist at the NCRI and a senior research fellow at the Miller Center, who directed the student research.

“Our hope is that the report serves as a timely warning before the hate messaging leads to real-world violence,” said Denver Riggleman, former U.S. congressman and Miller Center Research fellow and visiting scholar.

The analysis follows a series of reports that NCRI and Rutgers Centers have released since 2020 that examine the use of conspiracy theories and social media networks to instigate widespread, real-world violence. 

The NC Lab is a cyber-social threat identification and forecasting center developed through a partnership between the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), the Rutgers Miller Center for Community Protection and Resilience and the Rutgers Center for Critical Intelligence Studies. The NC Lab’s next report, expected in August, will focus on reciprocal radicalization. 

All reports are available here.

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