Combating Islamophobia: Compromise, Community, and Harmony in Mitigating Harmful Online Content

Abstract

Despite significant advances in content moderation within HCI, social computing scholarship in this area remains constrained by secular values and Western interpretations of justice. As a result, current literature often overlooks religious and spiritual sensibilities, as well as communal peacebuilding efforts even when the harms originate from and strongly connected to faith sensitivities, such as Islamophobia. This article presents findings from a design and evaluation study on the reporting and moderation of Islamophobic posts on Twitter (currently known as “X”). By utilizing HCI theories and readily available NLP techniques, we developed an online tool for reporting and moderating Islamophobic tweets. We subsequently conducted usability studies, contextual inquiries, and interviews with 32 participants to assess the tool’s effectiveness in addressing Islamophobic content. Our study revealed that factors such as faith-related knowledge practices, fact-checking, communal leadership, social harmony, and the cultural-religious value of “compromise” significantly influence reactions to Islamophobic posts online. Expanding on these findings and drawing from the literature on conflict resolution in theology, legal studies, and justification, we explore how “Sulha,” a community-driven process for mitigating conflict and restoring communal peace, can cater to faith-based sensibilities in reporting and moderating Islamophobic content. Therefore, this article complements existing content moderation literature by recommending the adaptation of faith sensitivities in the design of computing tools and policies to mitigate Islamophobia and similar faith-related online harms.