Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Hatred towards marginalized communities in the West, particularly Muslims, has peaked in the Information Technology era. This has allowed far-right extremist and Islamophobic discourse to proliferate in cyberspace at alarming rates. Additionally, United States president Donald Trump has evoked and intensified racist and xenophobic messaging towards Muslims, within the United States and across the globe. This was particularly evident during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, where Islamophobia and racist propaganda towards Muslim communities proliferated through social network systems. As a result, anti-Muslim discourse has been legitimized and stylized in cyberspace. This paper addresses unprecedented cyber Islamophobia in the wake of the 2017 travel ban placed on Muslims in the United States. While cultural, political, and online abuse towards Muslims has become increasingly normalized, perpetrators of such abuse are often granted full impunity. By employing a content analysis of over 1.5 million tweets, this paper demonstrates how Muslim bodies in cyberspace have become sites of contestation, leaving them in an exceptional space where the law, if any, does not operate. Hence, this paper examines how cyberspace reconfigures and reinforces pre-existing stereotypes surrounding Muslim communities (e.g., dangerous and terrorists), in more effective and subtle ways.