From Hashtags to Hate: X’s Role in Fomenting Nationalist Sentiment During the India-Pakistan War

Abstract

Geopolitical tension triggers hate speech to flare on social media anyway. We study the 2025 India–Pakistan War as a case for analysis of the way hate speech on X (formerly Twitter) grew during and became more hateful as the conflict progressed. We crawled a huge dataset of war related content posted by Indian and Pakistani users, spread in pre-war buildup, the active hostilities and in the immediate aftermath. Applying cutting-edge hate speech detection and sentiment analysis methodologies, we found over 60,000 hateful posts (around 12% of the data set) and followed their emotional tone and trajectory. There is a clear surge in hate around India-pakistan’s sensitive events-blame and retribution after a terror strike, nationalism fuelled mood and comment during a military operation and continued acrimony during a ceasefire. Indian and Pakistani cyberspaces expressed different narrative frames— from Indian users’ patriotic indignation and anti-terrorist hashtags to the defiant irony and conspiracy-laden hashtags of Pakistani users— but the two came together to contribute to a very toxic digital atmosphere. These developments highlight the extent to which social media has evolved into a highly charged digital battlefield for stoking inter-state hatreds. The article fills previous methodological lacunae by broadening the range of researched data, taking a multilingual approach to the analysis and by situating interpretations within a conflict and communication perspective. From here, we consider theoretical implications of this work for online hate as an affective phenomenon in conflict and recommend actions for platforms and policy-makers to reduce tangible risks involving real-world hate speech magnified by international crises.