Hinduphobia is real! Rutgers study finds virulent anti-Hindu abuse & trolling online

researchers at Network Contagion Lab at Rutgers University-New Brunswick (NC Lab), on Wednesday, released a study, revealing a major surge in Hinduphobia on social media.  study titled, 'Anti-Hindu Disinformation: A Case Study of Hinduphobia on Social Media', has exposed a web of networks that are denigrating Hindus by sharing 'gecide' memes on various messaging services. 

study has analysed how extremists are sharing gecide memes on Hindus which are being circulated by ir networks. Researchers have used artificial intelligence and analysed around one million tweets, where it was found that Iranian troll ps were spreading anti-Hindu propaganda. In connection with same, several young analysts worked with school students from New Jersey Goverrs’ STEM Scholars program for data collection and analysis.

study found and shared a few horrifying memes against Hindus, and stated, "Our qualitative analysis suggests that pajeet is used in reference to Hindus and Indians interchangeably, with majority of derogatory characterizations targeted towards Hindus. In particular, distinctly Hindu symbols (swastika, tilaks, etc.) are used persistently in memes referencing 'pajeet', while analogue is t true for imry specific to Islam, Christianity, or or religions within India." It is worth mentioning that 'pajeet' is a derogatory word used for mocking Indians. 

Rise in Hinduphobia on social media

One out of many memes that was found in research showed a Pakistani mocking  26/11 Mumbai terror attack, where 175 incent lives were snatched away by Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists. Ar meme made a spoof of George Floyd's tragic death, by replacing him with a brown complexioned Hindu man, who had a swastika on his shirt and a tilak on his forehead. 

Ar meme circulated by purported white supremacist groups showed a white student trolling a Hindu student, who is brown and wearing a tilak, by passing him toilet paper in middle of class, ending up offending him.

study found that us of stereotypical “pajeet” is surging on mainstream social media platforms, especially Twitter. This word picked up prominence in 2020 and is w being used over 250 times a day. For example, after Parag Agarwal was appointed as Twitter CEO in late vember 2021, re was an increase in us of “pajeet".

Twitter had released an information operations dataset, which provides information on state sponsored Twitter accounts. Using this dataset, a total of 1,766,301 tweets from state-sponsored Iranian trolls from 2010 to 2021 were examined. Analysing this data, study group developed a topic network for “Hindu” as well as a time series analysis for “Hindu” and “India”, which brought out surprising results that prove trend of anti-Hindu propaganda on social media.