Community members work to oppose increase in hate speech online and in person
There are calls to expand the e-safety commissioner's remit, amid soaring rates of antisemitism and islamophobia online. Studies of hateful comments across ten social media platforms have found there's been a "significant" increase of them since October 7 and the war in Gaza. The Australian research is already being used for international police training.
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00:00Hundreds of posts spewing hate and lies.
00:08Tracking anti-Semitism and Islamophobia means diving into some of the worst parts of the
00:13internet.
00:14It's rough.
00:15I think all of us who do the social media monitoring work, we all struggle with it from
00:21time to time.
00:22There can be a personal risk for people involved, so we're not using this researcher's name.
00:27But she's part of a team going online for an hour at a time to record offensive content.
00:33So having real people look at this means we see things that artificial intelligence won't.
00:41There's a lot of dog whistles that are used, coded language, things like that.
00:46Firstly, thank you for all the work on getting the report where it is.
00:49The online hate prevention institute has documented a significant rise in Islamophobia and anti-Semitism
00:57following October 7 and the war in Gaza.
01:00Our work looked at 10 different social media platforms and the increase is at different
01:06levels but it's up significantly on every single platform.
01:10Dr Andre Obla recently used the findings to run training for police from across the world,
01:16including Australia.
01:18Looking at both anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hate, identifying it, what are the common
01:22themes and ways it expresses itself and looking at what the platforms are doing, where the
01:29gaps are, where law enforcement can currently step in and where maybe we need to start thinking
01:34about new powers that may be needed.
01:36The institute's report into Islamophobia and racism against Palestinians and Arabs looked
01:42at data from October to February.
01:45It found 1,169 offensive items over 160 hours of searching.
01:53Researchers believe it represents an increase of at least 400%.
01:58An earlier report tracked anti-Semitism in the same way over the same period.
02:04It found 2,898 items, an increase of more than 530%.
02:12What we see is first it starts online, then it moves into the real world.
02:19Heshi Adalist has been voluntarily cleaning off anti-Semitic graffiti in Melbourne, including
02:26this call to kill Jewish people.
02:29We already have so much hate in this world already.
02:33If we would have said kill all Muslims or kill all Christians, I would have gone out
02:37and cleaned it.
02:38It's more about the hate.
02:39But when it said kill the Jews, since I am Jewish, it was a bit more personal.
02:45He says anti-Semitism is taking a toll on people.
02:49They're right now getting targeted because they're just Jewish and that hurts a lot.
02:54People at work, even at their homes, are being targeted online just because they're Jewish.
03:01We also got another case where there was some workplace discrimination.
03:05Elsewhere in the city, Abdu Rafi Sawano has been offering emotional and legal support
03:10to victims of Islamophobia.
03:13It's been extremely intense and horrible.
03:15It feels for our entire community that we've been going through a collective and unending
03:21trauma and while we're crying for our brothers and sisters overseas, we're also seeing the
03:26direct impacts on the ground here.
03:28He says it's important to be able to help.
03:31I wouldn't say it feels good, I would say it feels necessary.
03:34One recommendation is to increase the powers of Australia's e-safety commissioner.
03:39The online regulator can only address attacks on individuals, not groups of people.
03:45But we need e-safety to be able to take down such content as well.
03:48So they need to be able to issue a notice and they can't do that unless the government
03:52updates the legislation and actually gives them that power.
03:55People should be able to disagree peacefully on issues without resorting to the personal
03:59attack on someone based on their identity.
04:04The online hate prevention institute is hoping to get funding to run its social media study
04:09again one year on, to see if levels have fallen.
04:14In the interim, they're asking people to help fight back by reporting offensive posts to
04:19platforms when they see them.