RNA - Circulation of anti-Muslim messages and memes dominated Twitter for a month after Donald Trump was elected president of the U.S., a hate-watch analysis by civil rights group Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) found Thursday.
Pictures shared on the micro-blogging site ranged from naming London Mayor Sadiq Khan as “Hamaskhan” — a dangerous Pokémon who promotes Islamic terrorism — and calling President Barack Obama “Islam’s Trojan racist jihadi,” to a map showing the locations of three Islamic Centers in Oakland, California, according to SPLC.
The rights group analyzed the hate incidents on Twitter between Nov. 8 and Dec. 8 and found that over 1,750 unique photos and memes related to more than 1,800 Twitter accounts were widely shared during the period. The group noted that even though anti-Muslim rhetoric and imagery accounted for only about 4 percent of the total distributed images, these pictures were shared on a much larger scale. According to the report, a single image or meme was mostly shared over 100 times. In total, the hate pictures were redistributed over 2,750 times. Twitter has since suspended some of these accounts, the group noted.
A large chunk of the memes and pictures were either produced by or made reference to hate groups — mostly a Washington D.C.-based conservative think tank Center for Security Policy that is known for promoting anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. Some of the pictures shared were from a 2012 video series that claimed to expose Egypt’s banned Muslim Brotherhood’s successful efforts to infiltrate American society and government.
“Other memes and images were clearly an attempt to demonize Islam and Muslims. Some photographs depicted women being whipped and stoned in foreign countries — images commonly used by racists and anti-Muslim activists to claim that this behavior stands for all of Islam. Others centered on a conspiracy theory popularized worldwide that Islam is taking over Europe as a result of this year’s Syria refugee influx,” the SPLC report stated.
Overall, more than 80 tweets showed terror attacks committed by extremist Muslims and militants of the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS. These pictures — mostly focused on the assailant of last month’s Ohio State University attack —were shared nearly 4,000 times.
“The analysis also reflects a troubling anti-Muslim climate in the real world. The FBI’s recently released hate crime statistics for 2015 showing that anti-Muslim hate crimes increased by two-thirds from the previous year … Trump has also hired anti-Muslim figures as his advisors and tapped figures closely tied to anti-Muslim organizations as part of his cabinet,” the report said.
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