Being visibly Muslim online forces women into self-imposed digital withdrawal

Evidence

Our study found that Islamophobic hate crime has increased online particularly against Muslim women, for example, via social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (see also Awan, 2014). … Muslim women were therefore often living in a sense of fear and having to monitor their protection online. One of our participants, Hira, a White British convert who wears the hijab and abaya, mainly uses Facebook but has had to make her online profile private, because of the consistent online Islamophobic abuse she has suffered. She noted that, “I’ve had to re-adjust all my security settings, so that only friends can contact me or see my profile because of the abuse I’ve suffered”. Similar types of hostility arose when Muslim women began publicly making statements or expressing their opinions; they were confronted with abuse, misogynistic comments and threats of violence. — Irene Zempi and Imran Awan, Islamophobia, 170

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: digital Islamophobia as forced self-censorship — how visibility itself triggers retreat from public online space.
• XREF: Mirrors the reader’s notes on surveillance producing conformity in target communities.