Mumbai, India – Less than 24 hours after news broke of the April 22 attack, in which gunmen killed 25 tourists and a local pony rider in the Indian-administered Kashmir region, a new song surfaced on Indian YouTube.
Raqib Hameed Naik, the executive director of the Washington, DC-based Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), which tracks hate speech in India, said the centre has observed “a sharp spike” in anti-Muslim rhetoric on social media since the Kashmir attack.
“The [Muslim] community is frequently portrayed as an existential threat through memes, AI-generated images, videos and misinformation, systematically designed to inflame passions and justify exclusionary rhetoric,” Naik said.