The world sees rise in anti-Islamic tweets

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region—Recent months have seen a surge in “Islamophobic” tweets around the world, with close to 7,000 tweets sent every single day in July alone, according to a think-tank survey.

The figure has risen from 2,500 in April, according to the think-tank Demos, with the lorry attack in the French city of Nice and the failed coup attempt in Turkey believed to be one reason behind the surge.

The data collected is about tweets in English which Demos says were sent via 49 words and hashtags and most of them came from the United Kingdom, followed by the Netherlands, France and Germany.

“The highest number of "Islamophobic" tweets to be sent in one day, 21,190, came on 15 July - the day after a man ploughed a lorry into crowds on the seafront in Nice, killing 85 people. Jihadist group Islamic State (IS) claimed one of its followers carried out the attack.” BBC reported on Thursday.

BBC quoted Carl Miller, a research director at the left-of-centre think tank, describing the trend in anti-Islamic tweets as worrying as they were examples of people “being angry at the wider Muslim world".

Though he thought the tweets were "damaging, harmful, and tremendously problematic", Miller said that "only a thin sliver of them are actually illegal".

"Only when there's an actual threat to life are people actually breaking the law, and therefore the people that are in the online space are actually far less protected than the offline space when it comes to receiving that kind of abuse." Miller told BBC.

The other two days in July that saw the highest number of anti-Islamic tweets were the day after the coup attempt in Turkey in which 10,610 tweets were sent, and July 26, the day a French Catholic priest was murdered by extremist militants inside his church in the city of Rouen.

The deadly bombing in the Iraqi capital Baghdad’s Karrada neighborhood which claimed the lives of 250 people on July 3 also generated more than 9,000 anti-Islamic tweets.

Ruqaiya Haris, a 23-year-old Muslim student in London told the BBC that she has been receiving many angry and insulting tweets.

"It doesn't really matter what I say, or what I'm writing about, or what I'm posting about. The responses after some kind of terrorist attack will always be slating Islam in some kind of way - or insulting Islam, or insulting me, or insulting my hijab,” Haris said. “Even if I'm talking about something totally unrelated. Even if I'm sending condolences to the victims.”