From Anti-Muslim to Anti-Jewish: Target Substitution on Fringe Social Media Platforms and the Persistence of Online and Offline Hate

The 2016 presidential campaign saw high levels of anti-Muslim online and offline hate. But, by the August 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally, anti-Muslim discourse and hate crimes had partly receded, despite the group remaining politically salient and despite a sharp increase in White ‘nationalist’ activity targeting another religious minority, Jews. Was this by chance? Because we might expect White nationalist activity to increase hate against all groups, the counter-intuitive decline in anti-Muslim hate could have been coincidental. We argue instead that those shifts in animus toward Muslims and Jews should be considered in tandem, and that these over-time patterns of hate reflected different manifestations of elevated and constant religious ethnocentrism, especially among far-right extremists. Using data on fringe and mainstream social media sites and hate crime databases, we present two core sets of findings. First, increased anti-Jewish speech was partly driven by the same far-right communities and extremists who previously promoted anti-Muslim speech. Moreover, combined anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish rhetoric in fringe far-right social media over this period was sustained at a high and largely constant level, seeing shifts primarily in the targets of hate speech. Second, similar patterns manifest offline: hate crimes were more strongly associated with which group was targeted by hate speech, but not the overall prevalence of hate speech. Together, this study demonstrates a robust link between the dislike toward Muslims and dislike toward Jews, and how fringe groups organize the dissemination of hate.