India’s Hate Speech Crisis and the Myth of Neutral Platforms

On January 13, 2026, the India Hate Lab, a project of the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), released its annual report on hate speech events in India for 2025. It documented 1,319 verified hate speech events targeting Muslims and Christians across 21 states, one union territory, and the National Capital Territory of Delhi. An average of four events a day were reported, which is a 13 percent increase from 2024 and a 97 percent from 2023. More than 1,200 of these events left a digital trace, including videos from 1,278 incidents that were first shared or livestreamed on social media platforms, with Facebook accounting for 942 initial uploads, followed by YouTube, Instagram and X.

This escalation also came after a year in which platforms dialed back their own guardrails. On January 7, 2025, Meta announced an overhaul of its content moderation system, replacing third-party fact checkers in the US with crowdsourced Community Notes, relaxing hateful conduct policies, and narrowing automated scanning to fewer categories of content. Across the industry, trust and safety teams were being thinned out or restructured, with companies like X and TikTok cutting moderation staff and shifting more responsibility to automation.