The Politics of Fear and the Experience of Bangladeshi Religious Minority Communities Using Social Media Platforms

TL;DR

This study explores how fear influences social media use among Bangladeshi religious minorities, revealing social conformity pressures, misinformation, and stereotypes, and offers insights for improving online safety and interfaith dialogue.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive, faith-sensitive analysis of religious minorities' social media experiences in Bangladesh, integrating interdisciplinary perspectives and offering design lessons for CSCW.

Findings

Fear affects social media participation among minorities.

Misinformation and stereotypes reinforce social conformity.

Critical insights for online safety and interfaith communication.

Abstract

Despite significant research on online harm, polarization, public deliberation, and justice, CSCW still lacks a comprehensive understanding of the experiences of religious minorities, particularly in relation to fear, as prominently evident in our study. Gaining faith-sensitive insights into the expression, participation, and inter-religious interactions on social media can contribute to CSCW's literature on online safety and interfaith communication. In pursuit of this goal, we conducted a six-month-long, interview-based study with the Hindu, Buddhist, and Indigenous communities in Bangladesh. Our study draws on an extensive body of research encompassing the spiral of silence, the cultural politics of fear, and communication accommodation to examine how social media use by religious minorities is influenced by fear, which is associated with social conformity, misinformation, stigma, stereotypes, and South Asian postcolonial memory. Moreover, we engage with scholarly perspectives from religious studies, justice, and South Asian violence and offer important critical insights and design lessons for the CSCW literature on public deliberation, justice, and interfaith communication.