A/HRC/46/57 37. In addition to the groups mentioned by the Secretary-General, Roma in many parts of Europe have been the targets of choice for the poison of hate and violence propagated by social media platforms. Dalits in South Asia have been also at the receiving end, as have migrants and refugees, who are also, in any event, members of minorities. Antisemitism and Islamophobia have grown and expanded rapidly online. 5 38. What the world is experiencing through social media includes calls to genocide, against the Igbo minority in northern Nigeria in 2017 and against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar in 2018. There are calls to violence, murder, rape and other atrocities targeting Baha’i, Muslim and Christian minorities in some countries, Dalits in others, and incitement to violence against Roma minorities in Europe, against persons of African descent in many parts of the Americas, and so on. Migrants, who are also members of minorities, have continued to be scapegoated as sources of crime and disease, or portrayed as threats or corruptive influences. Hate speech, hate crimes and atrocities are surging against minorities, “facilitated by a handful of Internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history”.6 39. Social media have also portrayed minorities as a threat or danger, and contribute to violence towards them. For example, in 2018, a shooter who killed 11 worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, United States, had used the social media network Gab to circulate a conspiracy theory that Jews were bringing immigrants in to the United States to submerge white people in the country. Jews are the objects of a “great replacement” trope, exemplified by the Pittsburgh shooting, which seems to have originated in recent years with the far right in France and according to which certain non-white or non-Christian minorities would eventually demographically overcome and threaten “European” culture through immigration and high birth rates. 40. In Assam, India, where an exercise was under way to update the National Register of Citizens, Avaaz recently conducted a study of 800 posts on Facebook, and found a preponderance of hate speech against Bengali immigrants, who are openly referred to as “criminals”, “rapists”, “terrorists”, “pigs” and other dehumanizing terms. These posts had been shared almost 100,000 times, adding up to around 5.4 million views for violent hate speech. Another similar, India-wide, study of hate content on Facebook, conducted by Equality Labs, provided a breakdown of hate content on the platform: 37 per cent of the posts were Islamophobic (including anti-Rohingya material, posts referring to “love jihad”, glorification of earlier instances of violence against Muslims, and Islamophobic profanities), 16 per cent constituted fake news, 13 per cent targeted gender or sexuality, 13 per cent targeted caste minorities (40 per cent of these posts targeted caste-based reservation, while the rest consisted of caste slurs, anti-Ambedkar messages, posts decrying inter-caste personal relationships, and so on) and 9 per cent targeted other religious minorities. 41. These examples are the rule and not the exception worldwide in terms of the shape and content of hate speech. The OSCE hate crime data for 2018, covering European and other OSCE countries, indicate that more than 76 per cent of hate crimes involve Jewish, Muslim, Roma and other ethnic and religious minorities. 42. According to the information provided to the Special Rapporteur, minorities are increasingly and to a heartbreaking extent becoming victims of vitriol and hate, horrific in their brutality and animosity, in social media. 43. 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, even fatal, and result in so-called social media vigilante violence or “WhatsApp lynchings”. One well-known case in France led to physical attacks against a number of members of the Roma minority in 2014 after disinformation in social media that Roma had kidnapped a child in a white van. In a more deadly case, in Sri Lanka in 2018, 5 6 Savvas Zannettou and others, “A quantitative approach to understanding online antisemitism”, 24 November 2019. Available at www.arxiv.org/pdf/1809.01644.pdf. Anti-Defamation League, “Sacha Baron Cohen’s keynote address at ADL’s 2019 Never Is Now summit on anti-semitism and hate”, 21 November 2019. 7