The number of times anti-Islamic insults are used on Twitter is rising month-by-month, a new report reveals.
Analysis of the social media site found 215,246 Islamophobic tweets were sent in July this year – a staggering 289 every hour. Spikes in offensive language correlated with acts of terrorism, with the largest number of abusive tweets sent the day after the devastating Nice attack, the research says.
Researchers at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the Demos think tank, said identifying tweets that were hateful, derogatory and anti-Islamic was “a formidable challenge”.
They first collected all tweets that contained one of a list of terms that could be used in an anti-Islamic way, including ‘Jihadi’ and ‘Terrorist.’ Most are too offensive to be published.
Between 29 February and 2 August, 34 million tweets meeting the criteria were collected, but most were not anti-Islamic or hateful.
Algorithms were built and used to identify Islamophobic context within a tweet. For example, classifiers were built to separate tweets referring to Islamist terrorism from other forms of terrorism and then distinguish between messages attacking Muslim communities in the context of terrorism, from those defending the communities.
The researchers found many of the tweets, which were identified as derogatory and anti-Islamic, included specific references to recent acts of violence and attacked entire Muslim communities in the context of terrorism.
The largest of the spikes within July was the day following the Nice terrorist attack, with 21,190 tweets on 15 July. Not far behind, was the day after the shooting of police officers in Dallas on 8 July, when 11,320 Islamophobic tweets were sent.
The 17 July was the next worst date, with 10,610 Islamophobic tweets sent the day after the attempted military coup in Turkey, followed by the end of Ramadan on 5 July, with 9,220 tweets.
The day of an IS attack on a church in Normandy on 26 July, 8,950 upsetting tweets were posted, according to the study.
The think tank has been monitoring Islamophobic activity on the social network since March and said July recorded the highest volume of derogatory tweets of any month yet. It found an average of 4,972 Islamophobic tweets were sent a day since March.
Demos geo-located locate many of the tweets collected and found Islamophobic tweets originating in every EU member state. As only tweets in English were recorded, the majority were traced to English speaking countries. However outside the UK significant concentrations were identified in the Netherlands, France and Germany.
In December 2015, Twitter updated its policies to explicitly ban "hateful conduct" for the first time. The move has been followed-by agreements with officials in the EU – as well as Facebook and YouTube – to remove hate speech from their networks.
"Our rules prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others," a Twitter spokesperson told the BBC.
"We are continuing to invest heavily in improving our tools and enforcement systems to better allow us to identify and take faster action on abuse as it's happening and prevent repeat offenders."
Images courtesy of Demos
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
