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Hate in Word and Deed: The Temporal Association Between Online and Offline Islamophobia

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Abstract

Objectives

The aim of the present study is to explore whether there is a temporal association between anti-Islamic online and offline hate, and if so in which direction.

Methods

We used data on hateful Twitter content, and hate incidents and hate crimes/offences recorded by the Metropolitan Police Service in the United Kingdom to analyse this association, using time-series analysis. This study is unique in its use of newly developed technology to undertake big data analysis with recent, disaggregated online and offline hate data.

Results

Our study examined the ‘everyday’ incidents of (online and offline) hate that affect communities throughout the United Kingdom and we found that anti-Islamic hate speech followed rather than preceded Islamophobic hate offline.

Conclusions

Our findings likely point to what we have referred to as compound retaliation, which suggests that media and social media dissemination about offline acts of hate compound already tense intergroup hostilities, providing further permission for those to express hatred online. Such a situation represents the compounding of hate and hostility through offline and online networks that are likely to be reinforcing.

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Data Availability

The data that support the findings of this study were made available by the Metropolitan Police Service and Demos but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available.

Notes

  1. In this paper, the terms hate crime and hate offences will be used interchangeably and are to be distinguished from hate incidents.

  2. However, such statistics are not fully developed yet and need to be viewed with caution at this point (Home Office 2018). For an outline of criminal offences please see The Law Commission (2014, ch. 2) report. Even though not specifically designed to deal with online hate, the stirring up of racial, religious, or sexual orientation hatred offences under Part 3 and 3A of the Public Order Act 1986 can be used to prosecute offences committed via social media. Further, the Communications Act 2003, s. 127 or the Malicious Communications Act 1988, s. 1 can also be used to proscribe ‘grossly offensive’ online communication to which Sect. 145 or 146 Criminal Justice Act 2003 sentence enhancements may be applied. However, according to Bakalis (2018, p. 87), legislation is in place ‘to tackle various aspects of cyberhate, but in practice, the existing offences are difficult to use’.

  3. Other research studies have also attempted to examine the nature of online hate (Awan 2014), as well as the impacts that such incidents are likely to have (see Awan and Zempi 2016; Paterson et al. 2018).

  4. We want to acknowledge here that there is still an ongoing debate about using the term Islamophobia (see, e.g., Irfan 2021). Concerns include the vague nature of the term and that it ‘target[s] expressions of Muslimness or ‘perceived Muslimness’, rather than bigotry against Muslim individuals themselves’ (Malik 2019). Critique of using the term Islamophobia to describe our Twitter dataset included ‘conflat[ing] criticism of an idea (Islam) with abuse of people (Muslims), and that words like Islamophobia are used to shut down any kind of criticism of Islam’ (Miller 2016). Recently, the debate has shifted towards considering the term anti-Muslim, which refers more specifically to antipathy towards Muslims, but which has also been criticized for not encompassing non-Muslims (e.g. Sikhs) or mosques/schools as targets of such hate crimes/incidents (Irfan 2021). This debate is currently still ongoing and is in need of further scrutiny in the future; however, as Irfan (2021) states: ‘If the debate continues to focus on which term better describes the same phenomenon, we run the risk of getting lost in specifics of wordings and of policies and actions never being approved because no one can define them in one way’. In this paper, we use the terms Islamophobic (used by the Metropolitan Police Service when flagging such hate crimes) and anti-Islamic (terminology that describes our Twitter data) predominantly. In addition, the term anti-Muslim will be used when referring to the work of authors who have made specific reference to such terminology within their scholarship. Collectively, we use the terms Islamophobic, anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim to refer to online and offline incidents that are perceived to express prejudice or hostility towards Muslim people.

  5. This research was first presented at the International Network for Hate Studies Conference in Canada in May 2018 and at the Law Commission Hate Crime Research Conference in the UK in March 2019.

  6. Levin and McDevitt (1993) originally proposed three types of offender motivation (thrill, defensive, and mission) and later added retaliatory motivation to their original offender typology, where ‘retaliatory offenders are inspired by a desire to avenge a perceived degradation or assault on their group’ (McDevitt et al. 2002, p. 306). Compound retaliation is an expansion of this offender motivation.

  7. We acknowledge that there are difficulties with automatically classifying online hate speech using a collection of slurs and that we may have missed hateful content; however, ‘certain terms are particularly useful for distinguishing between hate speech and offensive language’ (Davidson et al. 2017, p. 515) and our search term list includes many hateful slurs. Since the end of our project in 2017, data collection methods have also further evolved (see, e.g., Alorainy et al. 2019; Vidgen and Yasseri 2020).

  8. In particular, the ‘Track API’ (https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/filter-realtime/overview/statuses-filter) was used to establish an ongoing, real-time collection of tweets matching a keyword, and the ‘Standard search’ API (https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/search/overview/standard) was used to return tweets matching a keyword sent in the seven days prior to beginning the collection. Each of these APIs can be accessed free of charge.

  9. More Twitter statistics can be found here: https://www.internetlivestats.com/twitter-statistics/.

  10. Uses of the term 'p*ki' which were not deemed to be hateful included uses of the term as shorthand for Pakistan, particularly with reference to cricket matches, or as an abbreviation of 'Pakistani' where no other hateful messaging was included. We also termed non-hateful some colloquial uses, which could be argued to be culturally problematic, such as the use of 'p*ki' as a term for a corner shop.

  11. This string allowed us to capture different terms, such as terrorism, terrorist and terrorists.

  12. A full list of collection terms can be found in the following paper, published by Demos: https://www.demos.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Results-Methods-Paper-MOPAC-SUMMIT-Demos.pdf

  13. See https://www.statista.com/statistics/306955/vpn-proxy-server-use-worldwide-by-region/.

  14. See https://www.statista.com/statistics/1219770/virtual-private-network-use-frequency-us-uk/.

  15. Due to restrictions placed by Twitter on the inaccessibility of deleted or removed tweets, some of the content identified as hateful by Method52 may since have been deleted or removed from the platform, and is no longer accessible to researchers. However, a Demos report by Miller et al. (2016) includes some more information and exploration of the data. Previous research also exists, exploring Islamophobic tweets (see, e.g., Awan 2016c) and anti-Muslim hate on Facebook (see, e.g., Oboler 2016).

  16. More information can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/home-secretary-announces-new-national-online-hate-crime-hub.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the work and contributions of Demos and its interns, and the support of the Metropolitan Police Service, CASM Consulting, and Palantir Technologies throughout the Policing Hate Crime Project, and are thankful to the people and charities who have offered advice on hateful terminology to search for online. We further like to thank the participants of the International Network for Hate Studies Conference in Canada (May 2018) and the Law Commission Hate Crime Research Conference in the UK (March 2019) for their helpful questions, comments and suggestions. Thank you also to the editors and reviewers for their considered comments and suggestions. This work was supported by the Police Knowledge Fund: ‘Policing Hate Crime: Modernising the craft, an evidence-based approach’.

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Correspondence to Susann Wiedlitzka.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

This study has been approved by the Sciences & Technology Cross-Schools Research Ethics Committee at the University of Sussex (ER/DAVIDW/9).

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Wiedlitzka, S., Prati, G., Brown, R. et al. Hate in Word and Deed: The Temporal Association Between Online and Offline Islamophobia. J Quant Criminol 39, 75–96 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-021-09530-9

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