Open Doors report highlights growing online abuse targeting religious minorities
Digital surveillance, censorship and disinformation are the new frontiers in the battle for religious freedom.
With 5 billion people having access to the internet and almost 84% of the globe’s population in possession of a smartphone, the world has become a digitally networked place. Along with its many advantages, it also carries risks.
A new report, “Digital Persecution – The New Frontier from freedom of Religion or Belief”, published by Open Doors UK and Ireland, highlights how surveillance technology, online censorship and social media in the hands of authoritarian regimes and extremist groups can bring great harm to already vulnerable groups such as religious minorities.
“Groups who rely on community and verbal communication as a ground of faith … often have no means of protecting themselves from the Goliath of autocracy and, via surveillance, censorship and disinformation, consigns them to an Orwellian existence,” wrote Sam Brownback, former US Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. The report highlights three key strands of persecution:
- Surveillance, through such tools as closed-circuit TV, data harvesting, spyware, and state monitoring of social media.
China is an early adopter of surveillance technology that has been trialled in Xinjiang province. A recent investigative report by The New York Times has uncovered that “China’s ambition to collect a staggering amount of personal data from everyday citizens is more expansive than previously known”. The Times found evidence of widespread use of phone tracking devices, the existence of some of the largest DNA databases in the world, and how voice prints from ordinary citizens are gathered through audio recorders attached to facial recognition cameras.
“Recently Chinese provinces and cities have approached companies with the request to implement Artificial Intelligence as much as possible to enable them to follow a “one person, one file” policy,” said Thomas Muller, persecution analyst with Open Doors’ World Watch Research.
“If this works out, the situation becomes much more dangerous,” he said. He then added: “As of now the surveillance tools are not particularly targeting Christians. The documents the New York Times had access to showed tools were acquired to monitor groups the government regards as ‘troublemakers’, such as political activists and ethnic minorities.
2. Censorship, through banning of online publications and blocking of websites and other forms of online communications.
Other examples of digital censorship include the punishment of users who visit certain websites and the cancelling of activities, platforms and public profiles often without reason, as well as the freezing of financial assets. Tech companies frequently comply with government wishes. For example, Apple and Google have removed Bible apps from their online stores in China.
The report also mentions how censorship can lead to ‘self-censorship’ where users adapt their behaviour so that punishment and the blocking of websites are not even necessary anymore.
3. Disinformation, through the spreading of deliberately misleading information and incitement of mob violence through social platforms.
In India, for example, this has been key in whipping up mob violence against Christian and Muslim minorities, as highlighted in a separate Open Doors report, “Destructive Lies”. There have been similar cases of online harassment in Myanmar, where Christians were accused of introducing Covid-19 into the country.
The Digital Persecution report describes how the phenomenon is rapidly spreading across the world and asserts that the threat remains largely ignored by governments and tech companies.
‘Language moderation gaps’
One of the challenges for tech companies is the vast number of languages used on their platforms which are not moderated. As a result of this “language moderation gap,” extremist ideas can circulate freely on the internet, says a recent report about the use of Facebook by Islamist groups in East Africa.
“Analysis showed the most active, networked, and multilingual ecosystem of support for al-Shabaab and the Islamic State existed on Facebook, where profiles and pages classified as ‘media outlets’ were sharing terrorist content openly … often linked to ‘media’ and ‘media personality’ pages in Somali, Kiswahili and Arabic”, said the report, by the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
Sukumar
Sukumar is an Indian believer whose life was taken because of a lie that circulated on social media. He was only a teenager when he was crushed and hacked to death. His alleged crime? Witchcraft. In 2020 several locals became ill and died due to contamination of the water. Local activists, however, came to believe that these deaths were caused by Christian witchcraft. This had been circulated on social media, through Facebook and WhatsApp. In the middle of the night in the winter of 2020, Sukumar was abducted. After his dismembered corpse was discovered, the local news stations reported that Sukumar had, through witchcraft, caused the deaths of the villagers. This is despite the fact that people continued to die after his body was discovered.
This is not the only falsehood disseminated about Christians and other religious minorities in India. In India the most common accusations levelled against Christians are those of forced conversion and cattle slaughter. Christians are painted as mercenary colonialists who take money in exchange for ‘destroying Hindu culture’. Through intimidation or bribery, it is alleged that these Christians are systematically degrading India’s way of life by converting people away from Hinduism. This misrepresentation is propagated through social and traditional media.
For example, a video of a routine prayer meeting may be circulated with the description, ‘a secret meeting to convert Hindus into Christianity’. Likewise, the advent of encrypted messaging like WhatsApp has allowed false allegations of forced conversion to spread quickly. Local agitators use these falsehoods to stir up communal violence, like that directed towards Pastor Vipin, who has now been attacked on numerous occasions by large gangs of young men, who have assaulted him and his 13-year-old daughter with impunity.
Another frequent dishonesty about Christians, spread through social media, is that they kill cows as part of their faith. This misrepresentation of their religious beliefs is then used as grounds for violations of their human rights. One man, Ravi, was murdered by a ‘Gau Rakshak’ (cow protector) after he was allegedly involved in the sale of an ox. A mob of over 100 people accosted Ravi; other local Christian men were dragged out of their homes and beaten, and Christian women were sexually assaulted in the street as communal punishment for the alleged sale of this ox.
This misrepresentation of widespread slaughter of cattle by Christians is also validated by local leaders; in one shocking video, an elected politician of the BJP is seen making a speech in which he encourages faithful Indians to protect mother cow by ‘behead[ing] the heathens’, by that he means the Christians. The ability of extremist groups to use social and traditional media to shape public discourse and propagate falsehoods about those who do not fit in with their vision of India has resulted in widespread suspicion of religious minorities and cultivated a culture of violence. Nobody has ever faced arrest for any of these incidents, and destructive disinformation about Christians and other minorities continues to be spread through new technologies unabated.
Persecution through social media has become something many Christians fight against on a daily bases. It can be a vessel for misrepresentations and lies or a way the governments can limit community and religious materials. Either way, it becomes an effective way to target and attack Christians and it’s important to be aware of the things our brothers and sisters face.
