Social media platforms have become a primary conduit for the rapid spread of hate speech, misinformation, and inciting content directed at minority groups globally, often translating into real-world violence and discrimination
RECENT reports tracking hate speech on social media in India are often read as technical documents – accumulations of data points, graphs of virality, timelines of spikes. But read carefully, they amount to something far more disturbing. They are not merely documenting online excesses; they are mapping the systematic normalisation of hatred against minorities, and the quiet transformation of social media into a theatre where majoritarian violence is rehearsed, legitimised, and applauded.
What these reports expose is not a breakdown of regulation, but the success of an ideological project.
Across platforms – X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp – hate speech directed at Muslims, Christians, Dalits, Adivasis, Kashmiris, migrants, and political dissenters follows a consistent pattern. It is repetitive, coded, and directional. Muslims are portrayed as demographic threats, sexual predators, terrorists, and infiltrators. Christians are framed as converters and civilisational pollutants. Dalits and Adivasis are ridiculed, erased, or violently disciplined when they assert dignity. Kashmiris are reduced to security risks. Dissenters are branded traitors. This is not spontaneous rage; it is a script.
The reports repeatedly show spikes in hate during elections, communal incidents, international crises, or moments of political stress. But this framing misses the deeper point. Hate does not surge accidentally during these moments; it is activated. Social media has become a tool to consolidate majoritarian identity, redirect economic and social anxiety, and manufacture enemies when governance fails.
Perhaps the most chilling revelation across these studies is how mainstream hate has become. It no longer requires anonymity or fringe spaces. Verified handles, influencers with massive followings, religious demagogues, and political supporters circulate calls for boycott, demolition, expulsion, rape, and death with impunity. Vernacular slurs evade moderation while remaining unmistakable to their intended audience. Violence is aestheticised through memes, jokes, and euphemisms, making cruelty entertaining and dissent ridiculous.
What social media reports also reveal — often unintentionally — is the fusion of online hate with offline action. Lynching rumours begin as forwarded messages. Bulldozers follow viral outrage. Sexualised threats against minority women appear online before real assaults. Journalists, students, and activists are first discredited digitally before being arrested, attacked, or silenced physically. The boundary between speech and violence has not blurred; it has collapsed.
And yet, the state’s response remains deliberately evasive. Platforms are urged to self-regulate. Police invoke law and order selectively. Courts retreat into abstract debates about free speech, ignoring the gross asymmetry of power between those who incite and those who are incited against. Hate is treated as opinion; protest is treated as conspiracy. The effect is unmistakable: impunity flows upward, punishment downward.
Many reports describe this phenomenon as a “rise in hate speech,” as though it were an aberration from an otherwise healthy democratic norm. But this language understates the crisis. What we are witnessing is not a rise but an institutionalisation of hate. It is rewarded by algorithms, protected by silence, and reinforced by political alignment. Hate thrives not despite power, but because it mirrors power.
There is also a persistent temptation to locate the problem in technology. Algorithms are blamed, platform design is critiqued, and anonymity is questioned. These factors matter, but they are insufficient explanations. Algorithms amplify what society already tolerates. Platforms protect what power refuses to condemn. The real engine is ideological permission. When leaders dog-whistle, when ministers remain silent, and when perpetrators are celebrated rather than prosecuted, social media simply echoes what the political climate has already sanctioned.
The reports quietly confirm this by what they cannot fully name: accountability. They can map virality but not consequence. They can identify networks but not dismantle them. They stop short of asking why hate flows overwhelmingly in one direction — from the dominant towards the vulnerable — and why counter-speech is often punished more harshly than incitement.
This asymmetry exposes the lie at the heart of free speech absolutism. Speech is never equal in a society structured by caste, religion, capital, and state power. When a dominant group incites violence, it carries the weight of historical privilege and institutional backing. When minorities speak back, they are criminalised, put under surveillance, or erased. To pretend otherwise is to participate in the violence.
Minority hate online is not merely about expression. It is about citizenship being redefined. Who belongs unconditionally? Who must constantly prove loyalty? Who can be punished without remorse? Social media is the laboratory where these questions are answered daily, through repetition and ritual humiliation.
Perhaps the most devastating insight across these reports is how ordinary all this has become. Hate no longer shocks; it scrolls past. Calls for violence coexist with festival greetings, recipes, and selfies. This banalisation is the final triumph of majoritarianism — when cruelty no longer needs justification, only circulation.
India’s social media ecosystem today resembles not a public square, but a spectacle of intimidation, where minorities are reminded daily of their conditional existence. The damage is cumulative. It corrodes empathy, normalises suspicion, and prepares the ground for violence long before the first stone is thrown or the first bulldozer rolls in.
To read these reports honestly is to accept an uncomfortable truth: the crisis is not digital. It is political and moral. The question is not how to moderate content, but whether a society that tolerates such speech still recognises minorities as equal human beings.
Until that question is confronted — not by platforms, but by power — these reports will continue to appear. Each one will be more detailed, more precise, and more irrelevant. Because by then, hatred will no longer be a warning sign. It will be the operating system.
Punitive measures to halt hate speech on social media have become a key focus for governments, particularly through strengthening legal frameworks that hold both individual users and platforms accountable. Key approaches include, but are not limited to, criminal penalties, significant fines, platform-level content removal, and legal action against service providers.
Laws in various jurisdictions, including India, allow for imprisonment of up to three years (or five years for offences in places of worship) for promoting enmity between groups based on religion, race, or language.
Criminal law (e.g., IPC 153A, 295A) enables fines for individuals, with proposed, more severe penalties for inciting violence (e.g., up to Rs 5000 in India’s proposed 2017 amendment bill).
Courts have directed police to take suo moto action (acting on their own initiative) against hate speech without waiting for formal complaints, facilitating faster legal action.
There is also need for regulatory and legislative frameworks.
Proposed laws, such as India’s 2022 and 2024 bills, aim to specifically define and penalise online hate speech. Similarly, the establishment of specialised bodies, including tribunals to hear appeals against the removal of content, to ensure fairness in regulation. Modern legislation now explicitly includes “electronic communication” to address the specific spread of hate on the internet. There must be a demand that platforms release data on content removal and moderator effectiveness. User-generated counter-speech to make hate speech socially unacceptable. Legal and psychological support to individuals targeted by online hate must be introduced.
While these measures exist, they face challenges, including ensuring these regulations do not become tools for censorship, addressing the speed of content spread, and managing the cross-jurisdictional nature of the internet.
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Ranjan Solomon is a writer, researcher and activist based in Goa. He has worked in social movements since he was 19 years of age. The views expressed here are the author’s own and Clarion India does not necessarily share or subscribe to them. He can be contacted at ranjan.solomon@gmail.com
