Shortly after the attacks in Brussels were carried out, a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment began hitting social media, with people using the hashtag #StopIslam. Hundreds of thousands of messages with that hashtag have been posted across the world on Twitter, according to Dataminr, a monitoring service. By Wednesday morning Twitter users were using the social media platform in a war of words, and some believed that comments on the #StopIslam hashtag platform were beginning to be censored due to its trending so powerfully. Initially users tweeted with the tag to express their frustration with another terrorist attack as well as the politicians who refuse to link the extremism with Islam. As the tag spawned a huge wave of tweets from around the world, people began using it to argue against condemning an entire religious group for the attacks. Other messages posted were ‘Christianity must be disempowered and demonised’, ‘Islam must be empowered and promoted’, and ‘#StopIslam is trending worldwide. There will never be peace in the Western world until Islam is gone’. See also: