Why Islamophobia spreads faster on WhatsApp © Provided by The Times of India
Telegram is too small and Twitter, too open. Unfettered by constraints of reach and scrutiny, political WhatsApp groups are where Islamophobic discourse is being driven in India. In the first large-scale study of fear speech, going over 2 million messages in more than 5,000 Indian WhatsApp groups, computer scientists from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have found that one in three posts in these groups incites fear of Muslims.
“We manually curated a dataset of 27,000 posts, out of which about 8,000 posts were fear speech,” the paper, to be presented at the Web Conference 2021, said. And these posts were directed at India’s Muslim community. “It’s a similar tactic used by all these groups. To be overtly Hindu,” lead author Dr Kiran Garimella from the MIT Institute of Data, Systems and Society told TOI.
Why Islamophobia spreads faster on WhatsApp
msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
3 Questions: Vaccines and the power of positive reinforcement
mit.edu - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from mit.edu Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Insights from MIT experts, delivered every Tuesday morning.
Email Address
“While public health officials and the media have been emphasizing the potential negative impact of vaccine hesitancy, our study found that emphasizing the overwhelming vaccine acceptance expressed by most people is a better way to get those who are unsure to accept COVID-19 vaccines,” said Aral, who is the director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy.
The preliminary paper, “Surfacing Norms to Increase Vaccine Acceptance,” was co-authored by MIT Sloan PhD student Alex Moehring, postdoctoral researcher Kiran Garimella, M. Amin Rahimian from the University of Pittsburgh, and Avinash Collis from the University of Texas. It is under peer review.