Group Salience, Inflammatory Rhetoric, and the Persistence of Hate Against Religious Minorities

Abstract

Recorded hate crimes surged at several points during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Observers argued that hate crimes, especially against Muslims, increased due to inflammatory rhetoric. Did anti-Muslim hate crimes decline after the salience of Muslims and accompanying inflammatory rhetoric receded? Or did emboldening and organizational effects on hate crimes endure? Using data sources on online discussions (4chan, Gab, Reddit), media coverage (newspapers, Google Trends), and hate crime databases (ADL, CAIR, FBI), we show that a sudden mid-2017 decline in media discussion of Muslims and in online communities was associated with a large and sustained drop in anti-Muslim hate. At nearly the same time as these shifts, however, we observe evidence of an increase in violent hate crimes committed against Jews, and Granger causality tests demonstrate that week-to-week changes in online extremist speech targeting one group versus another also predicted subsequent shifts in hate crimes and bias incidents. Platform-level and within-individual analyses of online social media users suggest that increased anti-Jewish speech was partly driven by far-right communities and extremists who previously promoted anti-Muslim speech.

Hate crime supporters are found across age, gender, and income groups and are susceptible to violent political appeals

“…Finally, this study connects bottom–up and top–down accounts of antiminority violence. Supply-side accounts argue that political elites and public discourse affect the incidence of hate crime by shaping the opportunities and constraints for violent mobilization ( 30 – 32 ). By demonstrating that individual beliefs condoning antirefugee attacks can help elect elites that further propagate such violence, this paper offers a bridge between supply- and demand-side accounts of intergroup violence, making it clear that elite-level discourse reflects mass attitudes toward hate crime.…”