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

The 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. The 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 'genocide' memes on various messaging services. 

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

The 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 the majority of derogatory characterizations targeted towards Hindus. In particular, distinctly Hindu symbols (swastika, tilaks, etc.) are used persistently in memes referencing 'pajeet', while the analogue is not true for imagery specific to Islam, Christianity, or other 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 the research showed a Pakistani mocking the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack, where 175 innocent lives were snatched away by Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists. Another 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. 

Another 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 the middle of class, ending up offending him.

The study found that the usage of the stereotypical “pajeet” is surging on mainstream social media platforms, especially Twitter. This word picked up prominence in 2020 and is now being used over 250 times a day. For example, after Parag Agarwal was appointed as Twitter CEO in late November 2021, there was an increase in the usage 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, the 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 the trend of anti-Hindu propaganda on social media.