The official Dutch hotline for online discrimination received 652 complaints last year, over double the 2014 total.

Some 64% of the complaints concerned statements made on social media, 44% were about race and 22% about religion. Of the latter, 98% were about Islam, the Mind hotline report states.

‘Unfortunately, these sort of comments have become the order of the day,’ the platform’s director Titus Visser said in a statement. ‘People react impulsively on social meda to news items and end up being discriminatory. It is important these incidents are registered.’

Police

Nevertheless, most of the comments reported to the hotline did not break the law. Of those that did, Mind applied for 64 comments to be removed and made a formal police complaint about five of them.

The hotline was set up in early 2013 on the initiative of the justice and social affairs ministries.