Counting hate is a strange little science. You cannot weigh it or put it under a microscope, so researchers do the next best thing: they scroll. A lot. The Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH) has now done the scrolling for the rest of us, and the result, published on Sunday in a report titled The Rising Tide of Anti-South Asian Hate in the United States, is a number that lands like a dropped dumbbell.
According to the report, the monthly volume of hateful posts aimed at South Asians in the US on the social media platform X climbed 240 percent between January 2024 and June 2026 — from 12,904 posts a month to 43,843, Al Jazeera reports. That is not a gentle upward drift. That is a curve shaped like a hockey stick, or, if you prefer your metaphors domestic, like the graph on a utility bill after a rate hike.
Over the full stretch of the study, the total pile adds up to something even grimmer: more than 500,000 hateful posts identified on X, according to the American Bazaar’s account of the same CSOH findings. Half a million. Somewhere, a content moderation algorithm is either working very hard or not working at all, and the report’s numbers suggest one answer is likelier than the other.
Where the researchers point the finger
So who or what gets the credit? The researchers trace the surge to three forces working in unhappy harmony: US President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and rhetoric, economic anxiety, and the South Asian community’s growing visibility in American life. That last driver is the bleakly ironic one. Visibility is usually the thing minorities are told to want — representation, presence, a seat at the table. The CSOH’s analysis suggests visibility also works like a lantern: the brighter it burns, the more it attracts.
The targets, per the report, span Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis alike — a useful reminder that online bigotry, for all its venom, has never been strong on geography. The haters are not checking passports. They are operating on a classification system roughly as precise as a dartboard in a dark pub, and everyone in the general vicinity catches the darts.
It is worth being clear about what this kind of study can and cannot tell us. The CSOH measured posts on X, which is one platform with its own distinctive politics and ownership, and counting hate speech means deciding what counts — a judgment call baked into any such taxonomy. The 240 percent figure describes volume on that platform, not a direct census of American attitudes. What it does capture, though, is what people feel licensed to say in public, and that license, the researchers argue, is being issued from the top: when immigration crackdowns and heated rhetoric dominate national politics, the metaphorical pub gets louder.
The report does not appear to offer a neat solution, because there isn’t one. You cannot moderate your way out of a political climate any more than you can mop your way out of a flood. What the CSOH has done instead is put a ruler against the water line: 12,904 posts a month to 43,843, in thirty months, on a single platform. Whatever you think is driving it, the tide named in the report’s title is measurably, stubbornly rising — and the people it is rising around did nothing except become easier to see.