Washington: A study conducted by researchers at the U.K.’s University of Warwick has found that when United States president writes anti-Muslim tweets, the anti-Muslim hate crimes increase. The study, that was released on Monday, suggested that Trump’s tweets had predicted attacks on Muslims during the presidential campaign.
When Trump in a series of tweets had asked for a ban on Muslim immigration, reports of anti-Muslim attacks spiked. The FBI also registered around 25 anti-Muslim hate crimes. Of these crimes, there listed an attack on a Muslim man playing volleyball, and a severed pig’s head was also found on a Philadelphia mosque’s doorstep.
“To be clear, we do not claim that Donald Trump himself causes hate crimes out of thin air,” Carlo Schwarz, a doctoral student who worked on the study, told The Daily Beast.
“But what we think is interesting is that Trump’s tweets and hate crime only appear to be correlated after the start of his presidential run. It is also interesting that this correlation seems to be driven by areas with many Twitter users,” Schwarz said.
“Counties with many Twitter users experienced 12 times more anti-Muslim hate crimes per capita than those with few Twitter users under Trump,” the researchers found.