Washington, DC — Within hours of Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, the volume of anti-Muslim posts naming El-Sayed exploded.
New research from the Centre for the Study of Organised Hate (CSOH) shows posts targeting El-Sayed with Islamophobic abuse averaged 3,099 a day in the week after his win, up from a daily average of 155 in the two months before it, an increase of 1,895 percent.
On August 5, the day his rival conceded, the volume of anti-Muslim posts about him peaked at nearly 7,000 in a single day.
That single week produced more Islamophobic content about El-Sayed than the previous seven months combined.
It accounts for 56.7 percent of all 38,280 such posts recorded about him since January.