Introduction

“Donald Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representative can figure out what’s going on.” These words are from the Donald Trump campaign’s “Statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration,” published on December 7, 2015. Trump’s invective, and his touting of a ban on Muslims—recently restated as a ban of immigration from countries that have terrorist activity, and then to “extreme vetting”—has put Muslims front and center in a divisive electoral campaign.

Unlike any other presidential candidate, Trump is an active personal user of social media and has used his Twitter account to reiterate and restate his Islamophobic positions, galvanizing his followers to do the same. In January 2016, Trump re-tweeted an anonymous Nazi sympathizer and white supremacist with the Twitter handle @WhiteGenocideTM. Two days later, Trump retweeted another account, @EustaceFash, which also features #whitegenocide in its profile. Reports abound of Trump supporters outside rallies shouting, “Kill Muslims; Kill Them All.”

In a speech in South Carolina in February, 2016, Trump told a fabricated story involving General John Pershing’s execution of Muslim prisoners in the Philippines: “He took fifty bullets, and he dipped them in pig’s blood, and he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the fifty people, and they shot forty-nine of those people. And [to] the fiftieth person, he said, ‘You go back to your people and you tell them what happened.’ And for twenty-five years there wasn’t a problem, okay?” The implied moral of this fabricated story is simple: that you have to be tough on Muslims, perhaps even kill some, to teach them a lesson. On March 9, 2016, in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Trump reiterated his anti-Muslim stance in broader terms: “I think Islam hates us.”

Trump’s repeated conflation of Muslims as terrorists has promoted a rhetorical climate that permits and encourages Islamophobia. This paper attempts to put Trump’s statements in the context of perceptions of American Muslims and considers the role they play in normalizing the harassment and even violent intentions against them.

It is one thing to say that Islamophobia exists, but to really understand the threats it poses to American Muslims and to the Constitution’s principles of freedom of expression, freedom from discrimination based on race and religion, and more generally equality, it is necessary to dissect the anatomy of Islamophobia and how it relates to social media. How widespread is it? How has it seeped into existing precepts of permissible and criminal behavior? It is such a dissection that is the project of this paper: Using data from Google searches, Twitter hashtags, and Facebook posts on Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s pages, we present a snapshot of the prevalence of the increasingly partisan anti-Muslim sentiment in the lead-up to the November election.

The paper considers the use of social media both in perpetuating hatred against Muslims and prosecuting Muslims for terrorism-related crimes. In this sense, the paper intends to look at a spectrum of using social media language as an indicator of nefarious intent. Both when non-Muslims use hashtags such as #banislam, #killmuslims, and #islamisterror, and when alleged Muslim terror suspects engage in social media actions such as reposting videos from extremist groups or posting or re-tweeting from Twitter accounts that seem to have extremist allegiances. This juxtaposition allows us to see how different standards are applied when threatening or hate speech implicates the civil rights of Muslim minorities who are the targets of such speech versus when members of the same Muslim minority are being evaluated for alleged ties with extremist groups.

Section One of the paper looks at when and where spikes in online rhetoric against Muslims (and in defense of Muslims) happen and how they connect both to terror attacks within the United States (such as recent incidents in Orlando and San Bernardino) and to geographical locations in red and blue states. It compares the prevalence of Islamophobic searches and hashtags like “#killmuslims” and “#banmuslims” to those that belie a concern for discrimination and targeting of Muslims (“#islamophobia” and "#stophate"). In addition to Twitter and Facebook data, this section also looks at Google search prevalence, an indicator that has been shown in previous studies to be an accurate predictor of racial animus. This section will also look at reports on hate crimes against Muslims to understand how online Islamophobia connects to hate crimes against Muslims in real life. Finally, this section looks at what sorts of civil rights remedies, if any, are available to Muslims and what concerns for freedom of speech are reflected in the adjudication of these cases.

Section Two deals with social media activity and its use in prosecutions of Muslims under the Material Support for Terrorism Statute, the basis for most domestic terrorism indictments. Using the total numbers of cases filed under this statute, it investigates how frequently social media activity—such as maintaining Twitter accounts, posting and liking on Facebook, and participating in chat forums—is used as the basis for “material support for terrorism.” Hate speech is often considered un-actionable in court and protected under the First Amendment when it promises violence against Muslims, but considered unproblematic when presented as the basis for the material support for terrorism against a Muslim defendant. This comparison reveals the different evidentiary standards applied to the same speech based on who engages in it, and the legal roots for why hate crimes are not considered acts of domestic terrorism. Finally, this section looks at what, if any, First Amendment concerns are considered by courts when social media activity is used as the basis for material support for terror.

The final section of the paper looks at how other countries from the European Union tackle the balance between online hate speech and terror prosecutions. It looks at the standards of proof in relation to online social media activity utilized by the European Union, where Muslims are also a religious minority and where they are also subject to both online hate (and actual hate crimes) as well as terror indictments.

Undergirding the climate of the current US election are larger questions regarding what sorts of speech are considered permissible, threatening, and incriminating as they relate to American Muslims in post-9/11 America. This is not something that can be considered the momentary mess of a highly unusual election year. Instead, the disjunction between the lack of legal recourse available to a minority group as either victim or criminal exposes the weakness of a democratic system whose core values rest on procedural justice. A serious and urgent consideration is necessary of the double standard that exists between toleration of hate speech by a racial and religious majority as an unavoidable corollary of maintaining the freedom of cyberspace and the ease with which similar speech by American Muslims is made the basis for convictions under material support for terrorism.