Islamophobia Surges Online After Zohran Mamdani's Win
The 33-year-old assembly member, a Muslim democratic socialist, defeated former Governor Andrew Cuomo by 56% to 44% in the final round of ranked choice voting, marking a watershed moment for the Democratic establishment. Within hours of his win however, Mamdani became the target of coordinated online attacks that framed his faith, ideology, and heritage as threats to public life, according to the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH).
What comes next is a heated general election campaign, with the 33-year-old assembly member positioned to become the first Muslim mayor of New York City. The primary race was marked by offline Islamophobic rhetoric—most prominently from Cuomo's camp, which included flyers with Mamdani's beard lengthened and darkened. Mamdani condemned them as playing on "racist tropes."
The campaign had already seen instances of anti-Muslim sentiment, but the scale of the online response that followed the primary results was considerable. Social media platforms hosted a wave of anti-Muslim content that would generate hundreds of millions of views over the following days.
The study by CSOH, titled Digital Hate, Islamophobia, Zohran Mamdani, and NYC's Mayoral Primary and shared exclusively with TIME, tracked 6,669 posts mentioning Mamdani and related themes between June 13-30. The posts generated 419.2 million total engagements—including views, likes, shares, and comments.
'What we've witnessed was not just criticism of his policies,' notes Raqib Naik, Executive Director at the CSOH. 'It was a coordinated multi-platform surge of anti-Muslim hate, ideological fear mongering, and nativist exclusion.'
The surge was immediate. From June 13-23, hate-related posts about Mamdani averaged between 56-264 per day. On June 24, the day of the primary, that number jumped to 899 posts. By June 25, it had exploded to 2,173 posts in a single day.
The content itself followed distinct patterns. Of the 1,933 posts that researchers examined most closely, 39.4% contained explicit anti-Muslim language targeting either Mamdani specifically or Muslims broadly. These posts frequently portrayed Islam as incompatible with public office, with phrases like 'radical Muslim candidate' and warnings about 'Sharia law takeover.' Posts invoked 9/11 imagery and warned that New York would fall under 'Sharia law.' Many of them included language that described Mamdani as a 'jihadi,' 'radical Muslim,' or 'terrorist sympathizer.' Other phrases called for some level of deportation, including 'send him back.'
'The United States is currently, [in terms of] political polarization within its history, at its peak,' argued Naik. 'And then you have such a polarization and bring these other intersectional issues that could raise people's tempers and reinforce fears of the 'other.' When you blend that information ecosystem with so much hate and misinformation, it ends up eroding our civic space.'
A particularly troubling trend for the researchers was the conflation of religious and ideological attacks. Among posts containing Islamophobic language, 51.2% also included ideological demonization, labeling Mamdani's democratic-socialist platform as 'communist infiltration.' Such posts averaged 406,244 total interactions each, suggesting that blended attacks had significantly more reach than single-issue content.
'Those two things fused together give us the broader concern that this content isn't just about Mamdani, it doesn't just affect his candidacy, but it affects Muslim communities in America more broadly and at large,' says Kayla Bassett, the Director of Research at CSOH. 'The way that it's framed often disparages or casts doubts on all Muslims and their ability to participate in American civic life.'
The platforms hosting this content were primarily concentrated on X (formerly Twitter), which accounted for 64.6% of all posts in the dataset. The remaining posts were spread across 15 other platforms, including Facebook and GETTR.
Beyond religious and ideological attacks, 14.3% of posts contained nativist language calling for Mamdani's deportation or citizenship revocation. A smaller but notable 3.4% included allegations that Mamdani was 'anti-Hindu,' often originating from Hindu nationalist accounts both in India and the diaspora.
The broader landscape of Islamophobia in U.S. politics
The online backlash against Mamdani mirrors a broader trend of Islamophobia in American political life. The CSOH report situates the digital reaction to Mamdani's win within longstanding patterns of moral panic and political opportunism. It draws parallels to McCarthy-era red-baiting, where public figures were accused of communist sympathies to delegitimize their political participation. In Mamdani's case, religion and ideology were often conflated to create a dual narrative of threat—where being Muslim and socialist were seen as mutually reinforcing dangers.
This narrative appears to have significant staying power. According to the report, posts labeling Mamdani as a 'radical communist' also call on President Trump to invoke the Communist Control Act of 1954. High-engagement accounts used hashtags and crisis language such as 'New York has fallen' to amplify alarm. Many paired Islamophobic visuals, including memes of the Statue of Liberty in a niqab, with calls for surveillance, deportation, or denaturalization.
'Both known and notorious far right actors, as well as other participants in political discourse in the States, are all posting [this] content,' says Bassett. 'One of the concerns that stands out from my perspective is that the proportion of hatefulness within the content that we reviewed was exceedingly high.'
On June 24th, conservative commentator Charlie Kirk wrote on X: '24 years ago a group of Muslims killed 2,753 people on 9/11. Now a Muslim Socialist is on pace to run New York City.' President Donald Trump called Mamdani 'a 100% Communist Lunatic' in a Truth Social post the following day.
'9/11 is embedded in the memory of every American,' says Naik. 'So invoking that alongside criticizing someone for his faith, identity and religion in tandem puts that fear in the minds of people, especially people who are going to exercise their right to vote.'
While social media companies have taken some steps to combat disinformation, the report suggests that current efforts are insufficient to address surges like the one following Mamdani's win. 'Tech companies, historically, ebb and flow in terms of their willingness to address content that's on their platforms,' says Bassett, 'and most recently this year, I think we've seen a downturn in [their] appetite to moderate content.'
This year, Meta announced it would scale back its third-party fact-checking program on Instagram and Threads. Meanwhile, X dismantled much of its Trust and Safety infrastructure after Elon Musk's takeover in 2022 and now relies primarily on the crowd-sourced Community Notes feature, which experts say is slower to respond to coordinated hate campaigns.
What this means for real-world violence
Mamdani's historic win—both as a Muslim and a democratic socialist—marks a shift in New York City politics. But as the report shows, it also triggered a wave of digital hate that risked turning a local election into a referendum on Muslim political legitimacy in the U.S.
The posts depict Islam—not specific policies—as a fundamental threat to the public sphere. Islamophobia was one of the most common hate frames in the analyzed sample, reflecting New York's history of religion-based hate crimes broadly. In late June, a woman was asked 'Are you Muslim?' before being beaten by a man on a subway in Queens. In April, an NYU student prayer room in Bobst Library was vandalized with anti-Muslim graffiti, urinated-on mats and crude drawings.
'It's hard to say that this is going to happen, but I do worry a bit about things like voter intimidation or what that [voting] experience will be like,' says Bassett, 'and what kinds of activities we could see happening around poll day.'
If left unchecked, experts at CSOH argue, the kind of digital harassment seen after Mamdani's win could further legitimize and inflame anti-Muslim hate crimes and deter future candidates from Muslim or immigrant backgrounds from seeking office.
'There is this real genuine risk that this digital hate can spill further into real world harm and impact Muslims, those perceived as Muslim, and their supporters,' says Naik. 'It becomes very pertinent on social media platforms to act [and to] take down harmful speech, because we have seen numerous examples of how harmful speech can lead to offline violence, including political violence.'
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