How a peaceful festival is weaponized to spread religious hatred online : an OSINT analysis
Hello all, by this post I want to show how the name of a peaceful festival was used to spread religious hatred.
Disclaimer: By this post I don’t intend to harm any religious sentiments of any individual or any community.
Well as usual I was wondering through the meadows of twitter when I noticed this
The word “Onam” refers to a festival which is highly celebrated in the Kerala(a state on the southwestern Malabar Coast of India). Onam is a peaceful festival that brings people of various caste & religion together.
The Wikipedia page of Onam says two things clearly :
- Onam is an annual holiday and Hindu festival celebrated in Kerala, India
- It is a harvest festival celebrated by Malayali irrespective of religion
The second point is very important because it is that aspect of the festival that provides a secular outlook to it and Onam thus becomes a festival of unity and equality.
While people of Kerala and Malayalis all over the world was celebrating Onam on August 31, 2020 an online war was going on in twitter under the trending phrase “Onam is a Hindu”
All the tweets with this phrase were not offensive but as always some used it to propagate religious hatred.
Some of the religous hatred tweets:
This is not all, there are more but this is enough to get you an idea about what we are dealing with here.
The ORIGIN
I traced the origin of this phrase (“Onam is a Hindu”) to a tweet which was tweeted at 2:15 PM Aug 22nd, 2020.
As you can see there is nothing offensive about this post as Hindus across India doesn’t share certain festivals as their beliefs and tradition differ from each other and this particular tweet gives the fact about it.
But if you analyze the successive tweets&replies with “Onam is a Hindu” in it, it takes a negative shade and gradually gets weaponized into spreading religious hatred.
Many twitter accounts that are spreading such hatred are either recently created for this very purpose and many are matured accounts with large number of followers.
Conclusion :
Its clear how a simple benevolent tweet can be gradually weaponized into spreading hatred in internet and even becomes TRENDING in a very small duration.
Request:
The world is already divided a lot and we do realize how bad it is when people suffer because of this, lets not further divide and increase the suffering, lets spread peace and harmony and most importantly love.
I want to end this post with a tribute to CHADWICK BOSEMAN by mentioning a quote from his movie BLACK PANTHER
“In times of crisis, the wise build bridges while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe”
— King T’Challa/Black Panther
