From ‘terrorist’ to ‘anti-Hindu’: 1.15mn posts targeted Mamdani, Indian officials among those who shared
text_fields
On the eve of Indian-origin Zohran Mamdani being elected as New York Mayor is being celebrated, the steps to reach the chair were not congenial for him, as a recent study revealed he faced multi-level slurs throughout his campaign — from Islamophobic, xenophobic, red-baiting to anti–South Asian hate on social media — where a staggering 1.15 million posts targeted him with a reach of 150 billion, and about 17.1 million posts were circulated about Mamdani across various social media platforms in 2025.
The 89-page study, titled Tracing Online Hate Against Zohran Mamdani, released by the US-based anti-caste civil rights coalition Equality Labs, which was founded by Dalit activist and writer Thenmozhi Soundararajan, exposes the scale and sophistication of digital hate, disinformation, and coordinated narrative attacks directed at Mamdani, who became a prominent face of working-class politics and a vocal critic of right-wing ideologies both in the United States and globally.
The study revealed that 45 Republican officials from 18 US states, including senators, governors, and members of the House of Representatives, amplified the online hate, while at least 26 international politicians, ambassadors, and government figures from 14 countries, including India, Israel, France, and the United Kingdom, also engaged in the campaign.
Equality Labs manually analysed 500 social media posts across 12 platforms between June and October 2025, following Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primaries, while also conducting a large-scale yearlong assessment of over 17 million online posts.
The analysis identified patterns of Islamophobia, xenophobia, anti-working-class rhetoric, and anti-South Asian hate that dominated online discussions concerning Mamdani across social media platforms, including X, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, Meta, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and several other news and blog forums, showing the extensive spread of digital disinformation.
Of the manually monitored posts, 80.8 per cent were found to be Islamophobic, portraying Mamdani as a “Muslim invader” and a “threat to American culture,” with many drawing upon post-9/11 right-wing narratives that cast Muslim New Yorkers as outsiders, these portrayals being linked to broader ideological currents that sought to replace policy debate with insinuation and fear.
The report also found that 7.2 per cent of the posts characterised him as a “terrorist,” 5.4 per cent demanded his deportation or denaturalisation, and 2.4 per cent expressed anti-immigrant sentiments, while 9 per cent labelled him “anti-Hindu” owing to his criticism of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Ayodhya Ram Temple movement.
Further, 25.3 per cent of the tracked posts described him as “pro-Hamas” or anti-Semitic, as Mamdani has been an outspoken critic of Israel and its leadership, while another 23.8 per cent of posts described him as a communist or “socialist extremist,” with Equality Labs identifying a total of 1.62 million red-baiting posts that had a combined reach exceeding 330 billion, framing Mamdani’s progressive economic policies as radical or illegitimate.