Insta-hate: An exploration of Islamophobia and right-wing nationalism on Instagram amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in India

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light a crisis of racism and violence on social media by right-wing nationalists in India. Twitter and Instagram have become the online spaces to spew misinformation about the pandemic. Instagram pages such as Hindu_Secret and Hindu_he_hum have been unrelenting and vicious in spreading Islamophobic campaigns using the COVID-19 pandemic. This has opened up opportunities for targeting the Muslim community in India. This study positioned itself within the theoretical framework of Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding theory to uncover the visual and textual codes used to create stigma and blatant stereotypes that dehumanize and demonize certain communities using social media. This is an explorative inquiry that engaged in a semiotic analysis of the Instagram pages of Hindu_Secret and Hindu_he_hum. The study found encoded stereotypes of threat in the use of colour, religious structures, clothes and other physical markers of cultural identity in generating content for Islamophobia. Coronavirus was portrayed to have Islamic parentage in the memes; thus, it portrayed the Muslim community of nurturing and intentionally spreading the virus across India.

Rapid Sharing of Islamophobic Hate on Facebook: The Case of the Tablighi Jamaat Controversy

“…(Civila, S. et al 2020) analyzed the use of '#Stopislam' on Instagram through quantitative analysis methods in order to understand how demonization is used as a weapon of oppression in order to devalue specific individuals and to understand the role Instagram plays in this process. (Rajan, B., and Venkatraman, S. 2021) performed an exploratory inquiry that engaged in a semiotic analysis of the Instagram pages of Hindu Secret and Hindu he hum by using of Stuart Hall's encoding and decoding theory as a theoretical framework to uncover the visual and textual codes developed on social media to create stigmas and blatant stereotypes that dehumanize and demonize certain communities. They found encoded stereotypes of threat in the use of color, religious structures, clothing and other physical markers of cultural identity in the content created to engender Islamophobia.…”

Mensajes de odio hacia la comunidad LGTBIQ+ en los perfiles de Instagram de la prensa española

“…Algunos trabajos han estado enfocados en las elecciones generales de 2019 (Losada et al, 2021), otros en el lenguaje que se emplea en ellos, ya sea en portugués (Vargas et al, 2021) o en italiano (Corazza et al, 2019), para llevar a cabo humillación corporal o bodyshaming (Hamid et al, 2018) o para detectar ciberacoso (Cheng et al, 2019). Asimismo, pueden encontrarse investigaciones sobre racismo (Rajan y Venkatraman, 2021;Civila et al, 2020), mensajes de odio dirigidos a influencers (Martínez y Mayagoitia, 2021) y sobre cómo se comportan los adolescentes frente a ese tipo de comentarios (Astuti, 2019). El estudio concreto de discurso de odio contra la comunidad LGTBIQ+ no ha sido abordado en Instagram, aunque sí en otras redes sociales como Twitter (Sorigó, 2020), Facebook (Vega, 2019;Avellaneda, 2020;Dantas y Pereira, 2015) o en las redes sociales en general (Costa-Marques y García, 2018).…”

“I Discovered I Love to Pray Alone Too”: Pluralist Muslim Women’s Approaches to Practicing Islam during and after Ramadan 2020

“…The visibility bias in the study of Muslim experiences continues to operate, to a large degree, in research conducted after the COVID-19 pandemic began. Studies tend to be clustered in the following groups: (1) at the interface of state/local authority policies and Muslim practices (Al-Astewani 2020; Bi 2020; Piwko 2021; Kostecki and Piwko 2021; Thurston 2020) (2) analyses of institutional religious responses (Kühle 2021) and media representations of Muslim communities during the pandemic (Poole and Williamson 2021;Rajan and Venkatraman 2021). The handful of studies conducted with Muslims tend to be quantitative, and conducted in Europe, MENA, and South Asia (Ali et al 2020;Fekih-Romdhane and Cheour 2021;Jaspal et al 2020;Ripon et al 2020;Thomas and Barbato 2020).…”