Keeping Muslims Safe Online

Introduction

For us, this safety guide serves several key purposes:

1. It helps build confidence and resilience in Muslim users on Facebook in the face of hate speech and extremism as it will equip them with the knowledge and tools to effectively deal with it.
2. It empowers traditional faith leadership, who are not always experts in the online world, to both deal with threat themselves and disseminate this to their students.
3. It dispels pervading negative perceptions that Muslim communities have of platforms such as Facebook who are deemed to be ambivalent to the hate and prejudice that they receive online. This guide will reiterate that Facebook takes hate and extremism on its platform seriously and has developed effective tools to help mitigate the risks.

How the Guide was Developed

Key to the ‘how’ of the guide is the consultation procedure we undertook to ensure that it considers religious sensitivities and is easy to follow and understand.

The consultation procedure has been twofold.

1. We presented the guide to some of the key senior faith leadership within our network to get their impressions on it and ensure they would be comfortable sharing it with their local community/students.
2. The second part of the consultations included speaking to young Muslims in school settings. This involved short presentations about online usage and practical workshops around reading, discussing and practically implementing the guide. We presented them with examples of potential online hate they could face and asked them how they would react based on advice from the guide.