New Report Spotlights Anti-Indian Hate on X
Critics of Elon Musk’s social media platform X often describe it as a toxic cesspool. It certainly lived up to that reputation recently, when it allowed numerous anti-Indian posts to be widely viewed and circulated.
The Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C., has released a report on such posts entitled “Anti-Indian Hate on X: How the Platform Amplifies Racism and Xenophobia.”
According to the report, a surge in anti-Indian racist hatred in the last week of December 2024 was sparked following the appointment of Sriram Krishnan as an adviser to the incoming Trump administration on artificial intelligence. Krishnan’s prominence and his call to make it easier for skilled immigrants on H-1B visas to get green cards angered some X users. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy heightened the backlash on December 26 when he voiced his support for H-1B visas and denigrated American culture for promoting mediocrity.
The report states that Ramaswamy’s original post was “open to criticism on many grounds” and provoked plenty of reasonable discussion, but it also brought out a “deeply troubling expression of anti- Indian racism.”
CSOH documented and analyzed 128 X posts targeted at Indians broadly. The posts received more than 138 million views on X. Despite being in violation of X’s policies on hateful conduct, 125 of the posts remained active, as of January 3, 2025. Only one of 85 accounts that created the posts was suspended by X.
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Compiled and partly written by Indian humorist MELVIN DURAI, author of the novel Bala Takes the Plunge.
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