A/HRC/49/46 such countries as France, Ukraine and the United States of America. The phenomenon of hate speech in social media was neither as visible nor as prominent in 2010, but appears now to be a significant driver in creating a context where minorities may find themselves increasingly targeted as “others” or as threats to the majority “nation”, leading to an “us versus them” polarization, instrumentalized by majoritarian political personalities for shortterm electoral gains. As noted by the Special Rapporteur in a previous report to the Human Rights Council in 2021, minorities are overwhelmingly the main victims of hate and incitement to violence and discrimination. Where disaggregated data are available on hate speech in social media or on hate crimes, approximately 70 per cent or more of those targeted tend to belong to minorities.27 32. The phenomenon deserves to be emphasized, as it is a direct and significant contributing factor to situations potentially leading to violence and conflicts. 33. Hate speech begets hate crimes, as can misinformation and disinformation. As pointed out in one of the submissions to the Special Rapporteur, the Holocaust started not with the gas chambers, but with hate speech against a minority. False information may end up being harmful for minorities, and even fatal, and may result in social media vigilante violence or so-called “WhatsApp lynchings”. One well-known case in France involved physical attacks against a number of members of the Roma minority in 2014 after disinformation on social media that Roma had kidnapped a child in a white van. In a more deadly case, in Sri Lanka in 2018, rumours of a Muslim minority plot to sterilize the Sinhalese majority, circulating mainly on Facebook, led to deaths, with mobs in several towns burning mosques, shops and homes owned by Muslim minorities. There are a multitude of examples such as these against minorities. 34. The Special Rapporteur shares the concern expressed in one submission that dehumanizing language, often reducing minority groups to animals or insects, normalizes violence against such groups and makes their persecution and eventual elimination acceptable, and that, when committed with a discriminatory or biased intent, these violations become a pathway of demonization and dehumanization that can lead to genocide. Individuals can find themselves drawn by social media into dehumanizing language and hate environments and end up surrounded by people with similar viewpoints. They can thus become enmeshed in confirmation bias on social media, an incubating environment that has become particularly conducive to the expression of – and indeed has strengthened and confirmed – racist, intolerant and even violent viewpoints against certain scapegoated minorities.28 35. Unfortunately, United Nations and regional efforts have not kept pace, tending to ignore the conclusions of the 2018 United Nations/World Bank joint report on conflict prevention, namely that today’s main drivers of instability globally are group-based grievances around exclusion and injustice, and that the groups more often than not are minorities. In addition, in her 2010 report, the Independent Expert similarly connected conflicts with grievances over the denial of the human rights of minorities. It is disappointing that, among more recent United Nations pronouncements on the subject, neither the article “Conflict prevention means tackling economic, social, institutional drivers of strife” of 16 November 202129 nor the article “UN chief outlines ‘roadmap for inclusion’ to address root causes of conflict” of 9 November 2021 30 mentions group-based or, more accurately, minority grievances. Even the Secretary-General’s recent report entitled “Our Common Agenda”, 31 with significant emphasis on conflict prevention, makes no reference to the urgency of focusing on the links between violent conflicts and exclusion, discrimination and inequalities involving minorities as prime drivers of most contemporary conflicts. Even more surprisingly, there is not a single mention in the Secretary-General’s report of the foundational United Nations/World Bank joint report on conflict prevention – or recognition that group-based grievances (usually involving minorities) are at the root of most conflicts. 27 28 29 30 31 8 A/HRC/46/57, para. 21. See A/HRC/46/57. See https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/11/1105942. See https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/11/1105352. A/75/982.