LONDON // Islamophobia on Facebook has been "much more prevalent than previously thought" and is "being used by groups and individuals to inflame religious and racial hate", according to research carried out by the UK's Birmingham City University.
With under-resourced police forces overwhelmed by the scale of the problem and social media companies ineffective at policing their platforms, Muslims should not ignore abuse but report it at every opportunity, says the author of a paper published on Monday in the International Journal of Cyber Criminology.
A nearly two-year study of 100 Facebook pages carried out between 2013 and 2014 revealed 494 instances of Islamophobic abuse. Many were posted under the umbrella of known far-right UK-based organisations such as the English Defence League and Britain First and clearly breached British anti-hate laws, yet escaped both censure by Facebook and prosecution by the police.
According to the paper, Islamophobia on Social Media: A Qualitative Analysis of Facebook's Walls of Hate, Muslim women in particular were targeted for abuse, singled out on 76 occasions in writing and in illustrations as a security threat because of the way they dressed.
Accusing Muslim women of being a security threat was one of five main themes of anti-Islamic abuse identified by Imran Awan, an associate professor in criminology at Birmingham. The other themes were saying that Muslims should be deported, that they were terrorists or rapists and that there was a war between "them and us".
Dr Awan accused Facebook of a "laissez-faire" attitude to anti-Islamic abuse and called on it to strengthen its community standards, which he dismissed as ineffectual and weak.
Although he recognised the police were under-resourced, he said high-profile prosecutions should be pursued and lengthy sentences imposed by the courts to "make an example" of offenders and discourage others.
It was, he told The National, also "a real worry and a shame that the number of people reporting these offences is really low ... people need to bombard Facebook with complaints when this sort of thing happens, so the company will be much more in tune with what's happening on its platform".
Many of the examples of abuse quoted in the paper are too offensive to repeat in print. One typical highly abusive post, published by the so-called "English Defence League Sikh Division", was entitled "How Muslim scum celebrate Eid" and reported a supposedly true story about drink-driving involving Muslim youths from Pakistan.
With 93 "likes", the post attracted many hateful comments, including calls for the alleged culprits to be given lethal injections and the branding of all Muslims as "scum".
Dr Awan, who in 2014 addressed a conference in Abu Dhabi designed to promote peaceful coexistence in Muslim societies, is highly critical of Facebook's community standards, which he says leave plenty of scope for hate masquerading as humour.
According to the standards, "content that attacks people based on their actual or perceived race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or disease is not allowed". However, Facebook does allow "clear attempts at humour or satire that might otherwise be considered a possible threat or attack. This includes content that many people may find to be in bad taste".
Images purporting to use humour are frequently used to spread anti-Islamic messages on Facebook. One example highlighted by the report shows two identical Qurans pictured side-by-side and captioned "Islams [sic] Quran" and "ISIS Quran", with the heading "Spot the difference?".
Another post, on the Facebook page of the group Britain First, which describes itself as "a patriotic political party", posed the seemingly innocuous question "What's a typical British breakfast?" but was clearly intended "to stoke up animosity without being so explicit that it would be obviously illegal", said Dr Awan. The quotes underneath the post - including "For breakfast it would be good to chop a Muslim's head off" - made clear its intent.
The study was carried out between January 2013 and November 2014 and Dr Awan fears that subsequent global events, including the migrant crisis and various terrorist attacks in European countries, will have provoked only more prejudice against Muslims on Facebook, which in turn will generate more hostility in the offline world. This, he says, makes it "all the more important that Facebook and the authorities respond robustly to the problem".
His fears appeared to be confirmed last month by the UK organisation Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks which reported that incidents of anti-Islamic hate in the UK had increased by more than 300 per cent in 2015.
Last month Britain's National Police Chiefs' Council also reported that there had been a 57 per cent increase in reported hate crimes in the four days following the UK's referendum vote to leave the European Union. This followed a Brexit campaign centred on the issue of immigration.
Dr Awan said Brexit had without doubt "emboldened" those who held extreme racist and anti-Muslim views to express them on Facebook and elsewhere.
In May Facebook and other social media companies signed up to a new online code of conduct launched by the European Union, banning "all conduct publicly inciting to violence or hatred directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin".
That voluntary commitment remains at odds with Facebook's ongoing struggle "to balance giving people the power to express themselves whilst ensuring we provide a respectful environment", as Monika Bickert, the company's head of global policy management, put it at the launch of the code.
"I hope the code has an impact, but it is only voluntary and Facebook has to be prepared to take down posts," said Dr Awan. "Its community guidelines must be revisited and they need to be much more proactive."
It is, he acknowledged, a big task - Facebook has 1.6 billion users worldwide - "but on the other hand they make a lot of money, and they have a responsibility", he said.
"Yes, freedom of expression is paramount. But it must come with limits and responsibilities."
By the time of publication Facebook had not responded to a request for comment.
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