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Time Magazine
09-07-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
Islamophobia Surges Online After Zohran Mamdani's Win
Online Islamophobia spiked sharply in the immediate aftermath of Zohran Mamdani's victory in New York City's Democratic mayoral primary, new research has found. 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.'
The Independent
13-05-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Musk's X ‘amplified Islamophobia, hate speech and disinformation' in grooming gangs debate, damning report says
Elon Musk and his platform X played a central role in amplifying Islamophobic narratives around grooming gangs in the UK, a damning new report has said. The Centre for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH) said X had become a 'high-velocity distribution channel' for hate speech and conspiracy theories, particularly targeting British- Pakistani men and other South Asian and immigrant communities. The CSOH report 'Racialised Grooming Gangs: Elon Musk, X, and Amplification of Islamophobia in the UK' looks at the tech billionaire's influence in the debate around grooming gangs earlier this year. In January, Musk repeatedly posted or reposted about child grooming in the UK, accusing the Labour government of not doing enough to tackle it and calling for safeguarding minister Jess Phillips 'to go to prison'. Based on an analysis of 1,365 posts with over 1.5 billion engagements, the report found that Musk's personal interventions – alongside far-right channels – played a pivotal role in 'weaponising' the grooming gang discourse to scapegoat Muslims in the country, particularly British Pakistani men. That is despite police chiefs saying that most grooming gang offences in the UK were carried out by white men. 'The discourse surrounding the ' grooming gangs ' – amplified at unprecedented scale by Elon Musk 's interventions on X – illustrates a dangerous convergence between far-right ideologies and the failure of digital platforms to enforce even basic content moderation policies,' the report said. 'This report finds that X became a central hub for the spread of these narratives. In particular, we identified coordinated global activity involving individuals and organisations linked to promoting Islamophobic content. The 'grooming gangs' discourse must also be understood as part of the global far-right's broader search for political legitimacy in a post-2024 UK.' The report described Musk's role as 'instrumental' in amplifying the grooming gangs narrative, with his allegations against political figures like Keir Starmer offering legitimacy to far-right talking points. Musk accused Sir Keir of failing to tackle the scandal when he was the country's chief prosecutor, saying he was " complicit in the rape of Britain". 'His repeated accusations against prime minister Keir Starmer and the Labour Party – alleging cover-ups and complicity – offered political legitimacy to fringe actors and injected far-right talking points directly into the mainstream,' the report stated. 'By positioning himself as a champion of 'free speech', Musk created cover for the amplification of hate and disinformation, often quoting or engaging with known extremists. His platform served not only as a megaphone for these views, but as a shield against accountability, framing any criticism of disinformation as censorship or political suppression,' it said. 'The myth of institutional cover-up alleges that authorities – including the Labour Party, judiciary, and media – deliberately concealed crimes to protect minority communities or preserve political advantage. 'The aforementioned constructs multiculturalism and so-called 'political correctness' as conduits to such crimes, thus positioning diversity itself as a threat. Together, these sensationalist conspiracies serve to racialise sexual criminality, delegitimise and erode public trust in liberal public institutions.' The CSOH also pointed to another social media trend: sexual violence was being weaponised, with entire communities blamed for individual crimes. 'The scapegoating of Muslim men (particularly British Pakistani men) relies on long-standing orientalist and racist tropes to frame them as collectively (and sometimes solely) responsible for sexual violence,' the report said. Social media posts often portrayed Muslim men as foreign 'predators' and accused institutions of shielding them due to 'political correctness' and multiculturalism, the report added. London Mayor Sadiq Khan was among the public figures vilified based on his ethnicity and religion, with the report pointing to attacks by far-right activist Tommy Robinson. 'Tommy Robinson's X account called Sadiq Khan the 'Pakistani mayor of London' despite the fact Khan is a British citizen by birth. The post generated 854.1K views, 31K likes, 7.4K reposts and 1K comments. The report also claimed to have uncovered what it called a coordinated effort by India-based Hindu nationalist accounts to inject transnational Islamophobic narratives into the UK debate, further fuelling racialised paranoia and online hate. 'Of the 650 posts promoting hate against men of British Pakistani heritage, other South Asians, and immigrants, 107 explicitly Islamophobic posts were linked to X accounts associated with Hindu nationalists.' These posts collectively received a total engagement of 7.96 million views, 251K likes, 84.3K reposts, 12.3K bookmarks and 5.7K replies. In January, Sir Keir responded to Musk's attacks, amid mounting calls for a new public inquiry into child sexual exploitation and grooming in Oldham. Sir Keir said: 'Those that are spreading lies and misinformation, as far and as wide as possible – they're not interested in victims, they're interested in themselves.'
