Hawzah News Agency- Facial-recognition systems, however, often misread darker skin tones and hijabs. Border-control software, meanwhile, flags Muslim names as risks, and online moderation quietly removes posts about Palestine while allowing anti-Muslim hate to circulate freely.
“These systems didn’t become biased by accident'', Mutale Nkonde, CEO of AI for the People, explained to The New Arab. They were trained on data shaped by decades of policy decisions and security doctrines that framed Muslim identity as inherently suspicious.
“It’s a clear example of Islamophobic bias encoded into technology'', she says, “where political fear becomes data, and data becomes destiny''.
Online platforms claim to mitigate hate speech, yet research suggests a different pattern when it comes to anti-Muslim content. For example, the independent organisation Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) reported in 2023 that social-media companies failed to act on 89% of anti-Muslim (Islamophobia) hate that was reported.
The message is clear: while platforms market themselves as neutral arbiters of free expression, their moderation systems often let Islamophobic content proliferate unchecked and algorithmically.
Resistance, however, is growing. Muslim technologists, legal scholars, and digital rights advocates are beginning to challenge the opacity of algorithmic systems. If Muslim and Global South perspectives remain absent from the international debate, bias will continue to be treated as a technical fault rather than a political injustice.
“Until Muslim voices are part of writing the rules, AI ethics will remain a Western conversation about global problems'', Nkonde says.
Source: THE NEW ARAB
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