[Oakland, CA] — [1/20/26] —Our new report, Manufactured Hate: The Muslim Invasion Conspiracy, examines the national rise of Islamophobic narratives in online spaces across the United States in 2025, the first year of the second Trump administration, especially around the Muslim invasion conspiracy. Equality Labs tracked these narratives in several states documenting not only an increase in Islamophobic content but also a growing volume of material explicitly designed to inflame tensions and incite violence against the Muslim community.
For this report, our researchers employed a mixed-methods approach, combining:
- Quantitative analysis using social media intelligence tools to track volume, engagements and patterns of Islamophobic disinformation around the theme of “Muslim Invasion” across platforms as well as manually coding a set of over 1500 posts by our team of experts.
- Qualitative analysis through a hand-coded review of content across our dataset, allowing us to identify narratives, frames, and tactics that cannot be captured by metrics alone.
Together, these methods provide both a broad overview of the disinformation ecosystem and a granular understanding of how specific messages were constructed, targeted, and amplified across the United States, particularly in five battleground states.
Here is a summary of our findings:
- From January 1, 2025, to December 31, 2025, we identified more than 4.72 million Islamophobic posts targeting Muslim communities nationwide, generating 34.8 million total engagements, including likes, shares, comments, saves, taps, and clicks, across 12 social media platforms.
- In addition the top locations for this content was in the United States with 1.64 million posts while the top states for posting included Texas, Florida, California, Michigan, Arizona, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania.
- In our manually coded national dataset of more than 1,500 online posts, we found the most frequently recurring theme was Muslim Invasion.
“This report makes clear that Islamophobic disinformation is not an abstract online problem, but a coordinated and growing threat to the safety and dignity of Muslim communities,” said Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Executive Director of Equality Labs. “The ‘Muslim invasion’ narrative has become a central organizing frame for millions of posts designed to provoke fear, dehumanize Muslims, and incite hostility, particularly in key states across the country. Our findings highlight how online hate ecosystems are evolving and why confronting them is essential to safeguarding frontline communities and democratic discourse.”