Hinduphobia, hate speech, and anti-Hindu rhetoric are on the rise, according to a US investigation.

In their most recent assessment, US academics from Rutgers University claimed that ‘anti-Hindu disinformation’ on social media and messaging services has significantly increased. Experts claim that the investigation showed that over the past few years, hate speech against the Hindu community on social media has mostly gone unchecked.

The study ‘Anti-Hindu Disinformation: A Case Study of Hinduphobia on Social Media’ found that white nationalist and 4chan genocidal Pepe memes about Hindus are frequently propagated via radical Islamist web networks on messaging app Telegram and elsewhere.

Researchers from the Rutgers NC Lab used artificial intelligence to better understand how a coded and hidden linguistic pattern spread on social media.

Not all tweets that are anti-Hindu come from Pakistan. Researchers discovered Iran and other nations have state-sponsored information operations.

According to their analysis of 1 million tweets, Iranian trolls spread anti-Hindu stereotypes to sow discord as part of an influence campaign to accuse Hindus of committing a genocide against minorities in India.

Together with high school students from the New Jersey Governors’ STEM Scholars programme, data was gathered and analysed. They provided them with instruction on open-source intelligence gathering, machine learning for identifying cyber-social dangers, and the types of anti-Hindu misinformation.

The signal on anti-Hindu code phrases and memes hit record highs in July because to the escalating religious tensions in India and the recent execution of an Indian shopkeeper, which may be causing an upsurge in actual violence. Social media platforms typically aren’t aware of the code words, important images, and systematic nature of this hatred, despite the fact that it’s on the rise.

It should be noted that in January 2022, India asked the UN to recognise ‘Hinduphobia’ and other crimes of religious prejudice against Buddhism and Sikhism.

India’s ambassador to the UN, TS Tirumurti, urged the UN to recognise threats to Jews, Sikhs, and Hindus at a virtual meeting organised by the Global Counter-Terrorism Centre (GCTC) in Delhi.

Tirumurti had made the claim that the ‘development of contemporary kinds of religiophobia, especially anti-Hindu, anti-Buddhist, and anti-Sikh phobias is a topic of great alarm’ in order to address this problem.