Six years later, social media is the go-to hub for anti-Muslim rhetoric—the kind that inspired the murder of six-year-old Wadea al-Fayoume in Illinois in 2023, and that led a Texas woman to try to drown a 3-year-old Muslim child in a swimming pool, declaring as police cuffed her, “Tell [the child’s mom] I will kill her, and I will kill her whole family.”
These same accounts are also permitted to monetize their hatred.
The Islamic Council of Victoria in Australia counted “3,759,180 Islamophobic posts made on Twitter between 28 August 2019 and 27 August 2021” and found that only “14.83 percent of anti-Muslim tweets end up being removed.”
Small wonder, then, that an international coalition of Muslim and human rights, civil rights and advocacy groups signed a joint declaration that “massive profits social media platforms provide to corporations have generally rendered corporate leaders passive regarding the role of their platforms in operationalizing Islamophobia.”
With accountability virtually nil, social media platforms have become live-action peep shows for those who wish to follow in the Christchurch murderer’s footsteps. Nearly a third of the over 1,000 Instagram accounts researched posted videos of brutal physical assaults, primarily against Muslims. These same accounts are also permitted to monetize their hatred, freely calling for donations to carry on the hate. In 2023, The Intercept reported that a group of digital rights advocates, in an experiment testing Facebook’s moderation, ran a series of ads dehumanizing and calling for violence against Muslims. These test ads deliberately violated Facebook policies, with some containing calls for the murder of civilians and to wipe out “women and children and the elderly,” using terms like “Arab pigs.”
All the ads, complete with calls for violence and murder against Muslims, were approved by Facebook.
Facebook, in other words—maybe by negligence, maybe by design, but certainly by algorithm—promotes anti-Muslim hate.
March 15 was designated by unanimous General Assembly resolution in 2022 as United Nations International Day to Combat Islamophobia. It is, however, less a day set apart and more a plea for awareness and action against the wildfire of violent extremism that targets Muslims and their religion.
UN General Assembly President Philémon Yang said, on the occasion of this year’s observance, “We cannot accept the misuse of Islam for malicious intentions. Islamophobia is not an isolated issue. Rather, it is connected to xenophobia, intolerance, racism, sexism and the rampant spread of hate speech.”
Meanwhile, the conflagration of hate shows no sign of ebbing. In 2024, a Muslim advocacy group received 8,658 complaints, marking a 7.4 percent increase from the previous year, with employment discrimination becoming the most reported incident (15.4 percent of total complaints).
March 15 this year marks the midpoint of the sacred month of Ramadan, during which hundreds of millions of Muslims fast and pray to express devotion to their faith and to come closer to Allah. Ramadan commemorates the revelation of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad. It is therefore a time for the faithful to draw closer as well to the teachings of that holy book, a time for each individual to reflect on their life and their deeds and the effect those deeds have on their community and the world.
Those who wreak havoc in the name of hate and those who profit from it would be well advised to do likewise.
