As women’s football continues to grow its fanbase, players at both amateur and professional levels are receiving more attention online. But alongside this rise in visibility has come a sharp increase in abuse, with the growth of women’s sport mirrored by a growing backlash against it. The recent rise of the ‘manosphere’ has also contributed to a backslide in attitudes towards gender roles, particularly among young men whose views are increasingly shaped by online discourse.

In February 2025, radio presenter Marty Sheargold delivered a misogyny-radio rant in which he compared Australia’s Matildas to “year 10 girls” and said he would rather “hammer a nail through the head of [his] penis” than watch the national women’s football team. His comments were widely criticised across Australian media and the public square.

These attitudes threaten to undermine the women’s game at a time of historic growth. Women’s football has expanded significantly in the 21st century, especially in Australia, where the Matildas’ 2023 World Cup run captivated the nation and helped spark “Matildas Fever”. the most watched broadcasts in Australian history, creating a sense that women’s sport could overcome many of the hurdles facing it. Yet the attitudes behind Sheargold’s comments continue to appear online, where social media users remain fixated on any on-field mistake made by women.

The author of this briefing plays football at an amateur level and notes that errors and misplays are common in the men’s game. Yet clips of men making these mistakes rarely appear in the author’s Instagram feed and, when they do go viral, neither the framing nor the comments typically link the error to the player’s gender.

By contrast, mistakes by female players are routinely circulated and scrutinised across all levels of the women’s game, from Sunday league to international football. This reflects what Kilvington calls a “digitalized backlash against, and gatekeeping of, women’s growing presence in football”, creating an online space where “football fandom and expertise continue to be policed by men, in which beliefs about women’s inferiority fuel online ridicule and abuse.”

What did I see?

As part of this briefing, I located and analysed types of misogynistic abuse in various formats on Instagram, including: 

1. Mistake Content: Posts of women playing football, where mistakes are the key focus 

This kind of content denigrates the women’s game by unfairly drawing attention to them (often resulting in a slew of misogynistic commentary).

2. Traditionally Misogynistic Comments: Posts of regular clips of women’s football, drawing misogynistic commentary regardless of the nature of the clip.

It is worth noting that on many occasions, the posts do not always depict ‘lowlights’. They are often simply clips showcasing mundane aspects of the women’s game. And yet, the comments often reflect a deeply entrenched misogynistic discourse, whereby overwhelmingly male commenters seek to undermine the women involved with misogynistic claims. These can range from subtle to overt in their harmfulness; from simple proclamations that the commenter could do better than the players depicted, unfairly harsh critiques of the women in the clips regardless of the quality of the play, to comments telling women to ‘stay in the kitchen’ and other generally abusive, misogynistic rhetoric.

For example, the Official FIFA Women’s World Cup posted a clip of a goal by England Lioness International Footballer Chloe Kelly. Below we feature some of the accompanying comments, the tone of which were generally derisive and sexist in nature. Rather than heaping praise on the goalscorer who demonstrated technical skill and competence to score, derision and ridicule is directed at the goalkeeper of the opposition team.

Content posted by women’s teams’ official media accounts are met with misogynistic derision.

Continuing to snowball through the misogyny-filled corners of Instagram, the posts became darker and more abusive. A large number of clips are being posted with clear intention to denigrate. Young girls are ridiculed for playing sport in an amateur capacity.

The following screenshot is from an instagram clip of a local league match of teenagers, which inadvertently went viral and attracted a deluge of hateful comments, mostly by men.

The post below shows a clip of a goal where a goalkeeper has a delayed reaction causing a goal, which is then spliced together with 2 influencers ‘shadowboxing’, where 1 punches the other, and the recipient of the punch dodges at least 3 seconds after the original punch is thrown. This framing serves to demean the goalkeeper who is ‘guilty’ of the error of having a slow reaction.

Famous Australian sports star in Nick Kyrgios left a comment on this video. They commented using their public-facing, blue tick verified profile, receiving 12.3k likes for their remark “should get paid [sic.] the same as Hugo lorris [sic]. I see no difference”.

This is a sarcastic comment that insinuates that a call for equal pay is unreasonable due to perceived skill gaps between men and women. Kyrgios is a talented and recognisable tennis player, with influence and reach amongst young men and women in Australia.

If public figures like Kyrgios feel comfortable posting demeaning comments on his public profile without fear of backlash, it is indicative of the state of the public discourse around women’s sport. In particular, it speaks to the normalisation of hateful comments that would happily publicly undermine and degrade people simply enjoying or playing the sport.

The Algorithmic Dimension

There is some existing research in this space that explores the sociological drivers behind this pervasive subculture of misogyny. Fenton et al.’s (2023) research focuses on how fans globally respond to the greater visibility of female sport professionals on social media. Fenton’s study highlights that social media exacerbates toxic fan cultures. The research draws on Litchfield’s understanding of how unregulated social media environments cultivate a ‘veil of anonymity’, within which sexist discourses are emboldened. As part of his research, Fenton undertook ‘netnography’, his team embedding themselves for 7 months within TikTok football subcultures to collect and analyse qualitative data. 

4 key themes emerged:

1. Sexism: the place of women in football;
2. Misogyny and hatred of women;
3. Sexualisation of women; 
4. Demand for a male-only space.

Watching these clips left me with questions surrounding the algorithmic drivers behind some of the posts. They suggest the presence of a self-reinforcing feedback loop, whereby clips of women making mistakes garner attention and engagement, resulting in a further demand for some of these posts online by accounts that want to cultivate that engagement. From my experience researching this briefing, footage of women scoring goals did not garner nearly as much engagement as women making mistakes while playing football. 

Like viruses, disinformation and misinformation, sensationalist clips of mistakes travel fast, and social media is now being instrumentalised to shape perceptions of the women’s game. One goal after Arsenal W vs Olympique Lyonnais Feminin went viral as a result of Christian Endler’s mistake, and clips were subsequently reposted by ESPN UK on X, representing the sportscaster’s sole coverage for the whole weekend.  One Sport’s digital creator – Naylinsfootyjourney – points out that she is aware that mistakes happen across every game of football. The problem is the “same mistakes are overrepresented when it’s women, and that shapes the entire narrative”. 

In her view, social media’s selective representation of mistake content threatens to “distort perception of the level of the game, undermine players by framing them through mistakes”, as a consequence inviting toxic commentary and slowing audience growth. 

Online harm, Real-World consequence

The virality of these clips, and the mutually reinforcing nature of algorithmic engagement patterns, demonstrates how denigration of women in sport can be amplified online, with real world implications. Reporting statistics for 2024/25 from Kick It Out, the campaign set up to combat discrimination in football, showed incidents of sexism and misogyny rising by 67%, increasing from 115 to 192 reports. Much of this increase was attributed to online abuse, with sexist content specifically rising by 72%. This increase followed the launch of the organisation’s ‘Kick Sexism Out’ campaign amid calls for greater consistency in how sexist abuse is monitored and recorded across football.

As noted above, opaque algorithmic drivers result in some of these videos having large amounts of traffic. In the example below, a parent-operated account showing her 10-year-old daughter’s football highlights has 46k followers at the time of this article’s writing: and yet, the post that appeared in the ‘front page’ attracted 18.5 million views, and thousands of abusive comments from adult men.

A 2024 Article ‘Key Challenges Facing Women and Girls in Australian Sport‘ details the significant barriers to full participation and recognition for women and girls in Australia. 

Amidst a plethora of structural challenges, two of note are:

1. the high dropout rates among girls in their teenage years, as well as 
2. the lack of a supportive environment, whereby women’s sports suffer from inadequate funding, limited coverage, and unfavorable perceptions relative to the men’s game. 

Looking at the commentary alongside any of the above posts would conceivably only discourage young women who engage with this harmful content from becoming or remaining active in women’s sports, with potential second-order effects impacting quality, perceptions and funding opportunities relative to the men’s equivalent codes. Sometimes, like with Marty Sheargold, defenders of this behaviour instrumentalise humour as a defensive catch-all. To them, these posts may seem harmless and lighthearted, but when women’s sport faces ongoing issues regarding viewership, funding, and as a result, payment for professionals, these posts actively contribute to an environment that threatens the ongoing success of the women’s sport as a whole, and attention should be drawn to the issue before it impacts the longevity/security of those involved in the women’s game.

Conclusion 

All people, regardless of gender, deserve to engage with the sport they love in a way that feels safe. If our online sphere is anything to go by, we have a long way to go if we want to strive towards equality in this respect. 

A positive note to end on; when looking through content, I noticed the occasional appreciation posts underscoring some of the unappreciated aspects of the women’s game. 

In a post by Jvillanueavabebe captioned ‘these women are tougher than some men in soccer’, the user records himself reacting to a well-crafted overhead goal at the amateur level: 

• “Forget that they scored a goal in the most beautifulist fashion ever dawg… the fact that they were pulling, kicking each other..none of them went down and asked the ref for a red card like these fking men do in the sport. I think women in soccer is more interesting than men in soccer. I said what I said.”

The comments outside of the cesspool of manosphere inspired hatred largely affirm this supportive sentiment. While there will continue to be huge challenges, nothing can stop the growing popularity of the women’s game. Framed this way, the hateful rhetoric explored above serves as evidence of this alone; one day, hopefully as archaic examples of futile pushback against the inevitable rise of women’s football.

Note: OHPI’s staff debated vigorously over whether the word “football” or “soccer” should be used throughout this briefing. After much deliberation, “football” was agreed upon. We sincerely apologise for the inevitable hurt and confusion that this decision will have caused.

Media contact:
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Email: joshua@ohpi.org.au
Website: www.ohpi.org.au

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Brooke Blurton, an Indigenous Australian media personality, warned that the content should not be dismissed as humour, telling SBS:

“It’s about actually recognising the real impact that this has and continues to have on communities, on families, but especially young people who are already facing massive amounts of discrimination and prejudice every day”.

The video was removed for using the SBS logo, but was then reposted with a different logo and remains online.

In another video on April 7 2026 she dressed up as an Indian including the use of brownface and putting on an Indian accent. The video mocks Hindu Gurus.

The Online Hate Prevention Institute added “Holocaust jokes” as a dedicated category of antisemitism, despite it not explicitly appearing in the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism or the IHRA Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion. This is a response to racism and hate appearing under the guise of attempts at “humour”.

As our CEO, Dr Andre Oboler, told the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, this is the only category we felt compelled to add. It needed specific monitoring as platforms were giving it a free pass.

Lisa Jane Spencer’s latest racist video included Holocaust jokes as well as other explicit antisemitism. In fact, it repeated Holocaust denial content recently used in a video posted to the official social media channels of Panel House. Those videos led to charges being brought by police.

Spencer’s repeated use of social media to spread hate and attack minorities deserves a similar response and Victoria Police should be pressing charges under Section 474.17 of the Commonwealth Criminal Code which makes it a criminal offence to use the internet in a way a reasonable person would regard as “menacing, harassing or offensive”. It carries a maximum penalty of imprisonment for 3 years.

As she is holding herself out as a public figure, and has been in the media over her actions, OHPI has decided to address her by name in this briefing. We also note her use of “Buy me a coffee” for people to donate to support her work. The racism here seems to be at least partly financially motivated.

Breaking down the antisemitic video

The Opening Act

The antisemitic video we are examining was uploaded to Instagram on July 6th 2026, the same day the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion was questioning Meta (who owns Instagram) on their record of addressing online antisemitism.

The first thing to note is that Spencer dresses up as an “Israeli Jew” for this video. She has not only made herself a small Israeli flag, but is also wearing a kippah, a Jewish head covering usually worn by men but also worn by women in some streams of Judaism. In case anyone still misses the point, she adds a sub-title “Lisa Cohen, Israeli Jew”. All of this, in a video in which she mocks Jews and the Holocaust, is an instance of “Jewface”, the antisemitic form equivalent to “blackface” with respect to Black people.

Some have misused the term Jewface recently to complain about non-Jewish actors playing Jewish roles, but as the Dr Brynn Shiovitz noted in the Jewish Journal in 2022 it is more than this:

“Jewface” is an American vaudeville tradition which stems from such a practice of Othering. On the vaudeville stage, Jews and non-Jews would wear prosthetic noses and beards, adopt fake Yiddish accents, and play roles similar to those grotesque literary characters, in order to poke fun at or reinforce pre-existing stereotypes of Jewish immigrants. Within this specific late 19th/early 20th-century performance practice, Jewface was always an intended form of mockery.

The fact the video is tagged as “#satire #parody #aussiehumour” doesn’t diminish diminish its racist and offensive basis. It is also a form of harassment. For a Jewish community already under intense threat, the repetition of the Holocaust denial content recently used in conjunction with Nazi symbolism in the Panel House case is also likely to be menacing.

Inciting further antisemitism

The antisemitism this incites can be seen in a comment by another user who writes, “That’s so good. I hope you get 271,000 likes from 109 different countries.” As we explained in relation to the Panel House incident, the number 271,000 comes from a real document created during the Holocaust. As the Arolsen Archives note:

The document is genuine and comes from the Special Registry Office in Bad Arolsen. It lists the numbers of death certificates issued upon application for prisoners from concentration camps, such as Dachau, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen. The figures do not include the millions of Jews murdered in extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau or those who died in mass shootings.

The claim that “only 271,000 people died in the Holocaust” is false, but repeatedly promoted by Holocaust deniers.

The other number in the comment is 109, this is a reference to another antisemitic meme, one that actually started in Australia. It began when an antisemitic Australian website compiled what it said was a list of 109 places Jews were expelled from. It is used to suggest that Australia, or another country, should be the 110th country to expel Jews. As we noted in our report Social Media and the Normalisation of Hate: October 7 Two Years On (page 17):

This trope claims such expulsions are proof not of antisemitism, but that Jews are a danger to society. The trope originated on an early Australian website, biblebelievers.org.au, where a page listing “109 localities” that expelled Jews has been online since at least 2004.

Greed, Power, and Money Tropes

The video opens with the words “I’ll be the banker”, the cuts to the shot shown above where Lisa Jane Spencer says “recently I started to transition into being an Israeli Jew”. It then cuts back a game of Monopoly, Spencer saying, “I thought there used to be a gun token?”, before picking something up and saying, “is this the pot of silver? It is? I’ll just be this one then.”

These scenes spread harmful tropes about Jewish power, greed violence, and wealth. The antisemitic trope of the Jewish money-lender is linked to the Middle Ages when the Church law forbid Christians from money-lending, and Jews were, in many places, barred from owning land or joining guilds. Some Jews were able to fill the economic niche as moneylenders as they were barred from investing through many traditional means.

There is a strong link between this trope and antisemitic violence. While complaining about owing money to the bank was normal, some people with influence (often political leaders / nobles) would incite mobs to violence against the Jewish community in the hope that those they owed money to and their families would be killed, making their debt vanish.

Some other notes on this trope:

• A particular flavour of the attack on Jews as bankers was, as Encyclopedia Britannica noted, directed specifically against the Rothschild Family, a Jewish family who were prominent bankers.
• A common antisemitic conspiracy theory claims that Jews are greedy, control the banks, and use this financial control to manipulate society. This idea was promoted in infamous antisemitic text, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was also one of the forms of antisemitism Dr Oboler discussed as an expert witness and which was noted by the court in Wertheim v Haddad [2025] FCA 720.
• NBC has noted how the antisemitic tropes of Jews and money pervades western culture and can be seen from Shakespeare’s Shylock to Gringotts bank in Harry Potter.

The references in the video to being the “banker” and to wanting the “pot of silver” are direct reference to this antisemitic stereotype of greedy Jews who control banks and finance.

Connection to the land & “get out of jail free” cards

Lisa Jane Spencer continues, “I know people will say that I don’t have the heritage or the DNA connecting me to the land”. At this point the video transitions back to the scene of the game with Spencer picking up a chance card and saying “Oh! Another get out of jail free (laughs) I know it’s like my fifth one”. It cuts back to the reflective scene where she continues, “but that really doesn’t matter”.

There are two related themes mixed here. The first in an insinuation that the connection of Jewish people to Israel is a fake narrative promoted without any real basis, i.e. that the truth of it doesn’t matter. This denial of Jewish identity is a common form of antisemitism that manifests by denying Jewish history, heritage, and even scientific evidence from DNA.

The multiple “get out of jail free” cards references a common antisemitic claim that the Holocaust is used by Jews as the ultimate “get out of jail free” card (see references here, here, and here). This not only abuses the Holocaust, but promotes the idea Jews are weaponising their suffering to their advantage.

Later she states “I know I am an Israeli Jew” suggesting that it is her mere assertion that her supposedly fake identity relies upon, and that the identity of all Jews is just as fake.

270 and 600

Back in game mode, Lisa Jane Spencer continues, “I don’t know why you’ve only got two hundred and seventy, because I gave you six hundred”. This is a reference to the document discussed above under the section “Inciting further antisemitism”. In this scene Spencer “the Jew” claims she gave 600, a stand in for 6 million to make it work in the context of the game, while asserting her opponent in the game claims to have only received 270. In addition to engaging in the same Holocaust denial meme discussed above, this also presents the Jew not only as a banker but as a dishonest one.

I didn’t steal it

Lisa Jane Spencer is seen holding property cards as she says “No, I didn’t steal it, because it was just next to mine, and it was always mine”. This references what has become a common antisemitic meme which OHPI discussed in detail in our report “Online Antisemitism After 7 October 2023” (pages 216-220).

This meme is particularly well known around Melbourne and Sydney as a result of antisemitic stickers produced by Free Palestine Printing which have regularly been stuck in public places as a form of graffiti. The sticker shows an image that merges the Israeli flag with a picture of an identifiably religious looking Jew and features the slogan, “If I don’t steal it someone else will”. The person shown is not abstract Jewish character, the image is take from a video taken in 2021, when a Palestinian women instigated a confrontation with her Jewish neighbour.

In our report we described this sticker / online meme:

The image draws on traditional anti-Jewish stereotypes of Jews as greedy and thieving, as seen, for example, in the character of Fagin in Oliver Twist. The prominent use of the Israeli flag alongside the stereotypical looking Jew, demonstrates the blurring that is occurring among Palestinian activists between criticism of Israeli policy and an antisemitic targeting of Jews. The Jewish person is also “wearing” a Star of David, which brings flashbacks of yellow stars Jews had to wear under Nazi persecution. This has been added to the picture and was not part of the original photograph.

The allegation in the image, and what Lisa Jane Spencer presents with the property cards comment, is that Jews have stolen land that doesn’t belong to them. This claim is made both at the micro-level about particular properties, in the case of the stickers the house the person is living in, and at the macro level to argue that Israel itself is built on stolen Palestinian land.

This claim has a particular Australian nexus as a major issue in reconciliation between First Nations peoples and the Australia state is the claim that Australia was built on land stolen from First Nations peoples. There are efforts to recognise Indigenous connection to the land in public gatherings through a welcome to country or acknowledgment of country, civil society campaigns such as “pay the rent” which urges non-Indigenous Australians to make a payment to an Indigenous controlled fund, and formal treaty negotiations. The concept of stolen land is promoted though chants such as, “always was, always will be, Aboriginal land”.

The effort to translate the Australian experience to the Israel-Palestine situation is based on a high degree of ignorance. This is firstly because Jewish people are themselves, like Australia’s First Nations people, one of the world’s still surviving ancient peoples. The land in question is the traditional land of the Jewish people. Just as with Australia’s First Nations peoples, the connection to the specific land is embedded in customs, religious / spiritual practices, and the people’s traditional knowledge about their own identity. In both cases it is also supported by archaeological evidence. In the case of Israel, it is also supported by contemporary writings by other ancient nations it came into contact with. Finally there is the bible itself which documents this connection in writing, with the oldest records, the Dead Sea Scrolls, ranging in age from 2500 to 1800 years old.

If the logic of “Always was, always will be” was applied to Israel, then it was and should always be Jewish with no room for a Palestinian state – a position Israel itself rejected when it decided to commit to the land for peace deal in the Camp David Accords. The “it was always mine” comment made by Lisa Jane Spencer mocks the existence Jewish claim based on history and indigenous rights.

As to the stickers, the story there is perverse. The house is one that was quite legally owned by Jews during the British mandate. During the 1948 War of Independence, Jordan captured part of the territory that has belonged to the British Mandate and occupied it. This illegal occupation continued until 1967. During that time the Jewish owned property was occupied by a Palestinian family. After Israel captured the territory in 1967 and annexed Jerusalem (making it part of Israel proper, not part of the Occupied Territories) the Palestinian family continued to live there. In Israel the courts regular adjudicate on property disputes from both Jews and Palestinian-Israelis to reclaim property they were displaced from. In this case, a claim was made by a Jewish charity to reclaim the property. We note what happened next in the report (p. 220):

In 2009 an Israeli court ordered that half of a residential property in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in East Jerusalem, occupied by the al-Kurd family, was to be given to Jewish claimants. A wall was built down the middle of the property. Jewish settlers have since moved into the property. In 2021, with attention focused on the on-going legal dispute, Muna al-Kurd told her Jewish neighbour, “You know that this is not your house…. You are stealing my house.” He replied, “If I don’t steal it, someone else is going to steal it.” Referring to the fact that if he wasn’t occupying the half the court designed to the Jewish claimants, then someone else from the settler group would be there.

Despite the facts of the case, the disinformation campaign promoted by the Internet mean and the stickers has completely inverted people’s understanding of the situation. While the quote on the stickers is real, it has been stripped of its context and used to demonise the individual who said it (who is pictured in the stickers), and in general: Israeli settlers, all Israelis, and all Jews.

You’re kicking me out?

The stereotype of greedy Jews stealing money is emphasised by Lisa Jane Spencer ending the video with a “Shabbat Shalom”, immediately followed by a cut back to the game where she reaches over and picks up some money saying “You stole my hundred dollars, ok, this is mine”. Then she makes a false allegation saying, “You’re trying to sabotage me”. Can presenting Jews as dishonest and playing the victim. The she throws her hands back and says, “You’re kicking me out? What did I do?” The video end on this note.

This final comment is a return to references of Jews being expelled (the 109 countries trope, see above), and the claim it is that it is not because of antisemitism, but because of the way Jews behave, or the inherent harmful nature attributed to Jews.

Media contact:
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Email: joshua@ohpi.org.au
Website: www.ohpi.org.au

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Several experts, including OHPI CEO Dr Andre Oboler, condemned the way X (formerly Twitter) has been run since Elon Muck bought the platform. X Corp refused to appear before the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

“Elon Musk himself has amplified certain content that really promotes anti-Semitism and pushes hate,” chief executive of the Online Hate Prevention Institute, Andre Oboler, said.

X Corp has also been referred to as “difficult” to work with. Testimony from experts and affected individuals has discussed the frustration of complaints to social media companies disappearing into a black hole, with little action being taken.

Parents also testified to their experiences.

“A concerned Jewish father testified on Monday that social media platforms acted as “the playground” for increasing anti-Semitism in Australia.

The anonymous witness recounted the “horrifying ordeal” of reading online anti-Semitic attacks against his son which involved Nazi slogans and a poll discussing whether the then seven-year-old should kill himself.”

OHPI continues to measure the rise of antisemitism, and the spread of hate speech in general, across social media platforms, providing evidence that this is a genuine and growing problem, not to be dismissed as individual anecdotes.

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Speaking to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, Meta’s global policy director Benjamin Good  called prevalence the most important metric and claimed it remained low since the January 2025 changes, when Meta largely stopped its automated removal of hate speech. 

The same transparency report shows Facebook reduced the amount of hate speech it was removing by 79% as part of this change, yet with little to no impact on its prevalence metric.

This should not be possible.

Either Meta removed enormous volumes of hate speech that users would never have seen, or its prevalence metric is not properly capturing the scale of hate speech being shown to users.

Meta’s claim that prevalence remains low cannot be accepted at face value.

OHPI addressed these issues in a submission to the Royal Commission, accessible here.

Today Online Hate Prevention Institute CEO Dr Andre Oboler has responded to Meta’s testimony:

“What Meta is doing is like measuring Mount Everest in light-years and then saying it looks very small. The mountain has not changed, only the scale used to describe it. Meta’s prevalence metric has the same problem. It makes a vast amount of hate speech appear insignificant.

The better question is how many instances of hate speech are seen on Facebook per 100,000 people each year. That is closer to how we measure harm offline, including in crime statistics.

My calculations suggest Facebook users are seeing around 500,000 to 600,000 views of hate speech per 100,000 users each year. Across more than 3 billion Facebook users, that means hate speech is being shown roughly 5.8 billion times a year, yet Meta still calls this low.

This only counts the hate speech Meta recognises. Experts around the world have shown that much of the hate speech reported to Meta is not recognised by the company. The real level must be higher. The volume is almost too large to imagine, yet Meta’s metric makes it seem too small to matter.

In short, the real level of hate speech appears insignificant to Meta due to the scale they’re using to measure it”

Dr Oboler’s first report to the Royal Commission set out the calculation in detail. The results were:

• 577,430 views of hateful material per 100,000 Australian Facebook users per year
• 791,758 views of hateful material per 100,000 Australian Instagram users per year

Meta’s claim calls into question the extent to which the public are being given a meaningful account of online hate.

A prevalence figure expressed as a tiny percentage may make the problem sound small. But when applied across billions of users, it means billions of views of hate speech each year. To use Mount Everest again, we may make the world’s highest peak sound inconsequential to alien visitors by saying: “Mount Everest? Oh, it covers 0.0004% of the Earth’s surface.”

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They discuss how social media platforms X and Reddit only remove a fraction of antisemitic posts, citing figures presented to the commission by OHPI, as well as the challenge of AI.

“But AI was presenting new challenges, Dr Oboler said, as users could find relatively easy ways to bypass hate-speech filters.

“What it’s doing is allowing someone to upload a volume of new anti-Semitic content very rapidly,” he told the royal commission into anti-Semitism.”

“X marks the problem” is another concern, as Elon Musk’s platform shows a growing rate of antisemitism.

Read the article here.

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The Australian writes “Dr Oboler said changes to hate laws suggested on Tuesday by Labor MP Josh Burns , which would create a criminal offence for vilification, were important to reduce the responsibility on individuals to prosecute racial discrimination.
“The reason for having criminal sanctions is because it shifts the burden from the individual having to take it through the process to the state,” he said.“

Later, Dr Oboler presented data on removal rates to the Royal Commission, as The Australian noted, “A digital antisemitism watchdog has found only two of seven social media platforms it analysed removed more than half the hateful content it had flagged.”

Twitter/X in particular has been a prominent source of antisemitic content.

As said by The Australian, “Dr Oboler, the Online Hate Prevention Institute’s chief executive, said X Corp was “difficult to work with” and questioned the ethos of its high-profile owner, saying Mr Musk had enabled antisemitism by pointing to a gesture he made at US President Donald Trump’s second inauguration that was construed by many to be a Nazi salute.”

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CountryNews has covered the initial days of the the third block of public hearings for the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

OHPI’s expertise has also been cited.

CountryNews writes: “Online Hate Prevention Institute’s Andre Oboler, who has researched hate speech for more than a decade, said social media platforms X and Reddit removed less than a quarter of posts flagged as being anti-Semitic.

Reddit deleted 17 per cent, while X was slightly better at 24 per cent.

YouTube, LinkedIn and Telegram all removed just over 40 per cent. 

TikTok – which had less media flagged than other platforms – deleted about 62 per cent, while Facebook removed 54 per cent.“

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The Jewish Independent writes “But the sobering takeaway from this week’s sessions is that purveyors of online hate mostly do not need subterfuge. The RC was told repeatedly this week that social media platforms operating in Australia have their doors ajar to haters. The result is what Bondi Beach survivor Arsen Ostrovsky, in testimony, described as a “relentless, vicious cesspool”.”

Among the expert witnesses was OHPI’s Dr Andre Oboler (top right), who explained how the social media platforms algorithms expose Jews to a higher level of online hate, and how X (Twitter) in particular has become more toxic after it’s acquisition by Elon Musk.

Data collected by OHPI using a consistent methodology provides clear evidence of the growing problem of online antisemitism, which can be presented in forums like the Royal Commission. This kind of evidence is vital is proving that online hate is a real, pervasive problem on today’s internet.

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The post Social Media Fails to Curb Online Antisemitism first appeared on Online Hate Prevention Institute.

“A charity, which monitors and reports on online antisemitic content, has told the Royal Commission that the social media platform X is failing to stop antisemitic content on its platform.”

Later, they quoted OHPI CEO Dr Andre Oboler.

“The Online Hate Prevention Institute’s Andre Oboler says the organisation has found X allows hate content on its platform.

“Elon Musk himself has amplified certain content that really promotes antisemitism and pushes hate and obviously we after Trump’s election we saw the Nazi salute that he did at the event, so you know. Read it as you will, but there’s certainly a problem there that is being amplified and coming from someone with a huge degree of influence over the platform.”“

The post Royal Commission hears the social media platform X is amplifying antisemitic content first appeared on Online Hate Prevention Institute.

The Online Hate Prevention Institute (OHPI) has returned to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. Its evidence demonstrates that online antisemitism has become more persistent, more violent, and increasingly laundered through what often presents as legitimate political discourse.

OHPI CEO Dr Andre Oboler appeared before the Commission on Wednesday during its third block of public hearings, which is focused on the treatment of Jewish people in mainstream and social media. The third public hearing block is being held in Sydney from 29 June to 10 July 2026. The ABC and SBS are also scheduled to appear, along with Jewish Australians who have experienced online hate

Dr Oboler told the Commission that OHPI’s monitoring had found major differences in how platforms respond when antisemitic and extremist content is reported. In one OHPI sample, TikTok removed 64 per cent of more than 400 reported videos, Meta removed 54 per cent of 950 reported Facebook posts, X removed 24 per cent of 1,700 reported posts, and Reddit removed 17 per cent of more than 1,000 reported posts.

He said OHPI had been able to get antisemitic and extremist content removed from some platforms, while others were far less responsive. Referring to X, formerly Twitter, Dr Oboler said: “X was generally difficult to work with, particularly from Australia.”

X has not responded to repeated requests for engagement from the Royal Commission. Dr Oboler said it had been several years since OHPI had meaningful contact with the platform.

OHPI’s evidence also pointed to a sharp rise in antisemitic material after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023 and the subsequent war in Gaza. OHPI recorded a “five-fold” increase in antisemitic content online, with conflict involving Iran causing “re-energisation” of antisemitic content across platforms.

Speaking outside the inquiry, he said OHPI had printed a sample of the material in “two giant folders of hate” and provided it to the Commission as part of his expert evidence.

“It’s all sorts of content, some of it quite violent,” Dr Oboler said.

The Commission also heard that antisemitic content is often framed in ways that avoid platform moderation systems. Dr Oboler said some platforms could identify older antisemitic tropes, but struggled when hate was expressed through political language.

“The minute there’s any political discussion around it they seem to give it a free pass, so we have content there that is extremely antisemitic using Zionist as a code word, but just isn’t being dealt with,” he said.

Dr Oboler told the Commission that OHPI’s research found a correlation between pro-Palestine activism and harmful rhetoric, while stressing that the activism itself was not inherently antisemitic.

“I’m not saying that all those activities are anti-Semitic – far from it,” Dr Oboler said.

“But there is a segment of anti-Semitism that goes on the bandwagon with that [activism] – and when there’s less activism, there’s therefore obviously less opportunity for that anti-Semitism to rise.”

Dr Oboler also addressed the impact of Elon Musk’s 2022 purchase of X. He said the takeover resulted in almost 80 per cent of trust and safety staff being fired, a shift towards an “absolute free speech” approach, and previously banned users being allowed back onto the platform.

The Tackling Hate Lab also called for a permanent observatory of hate covering online and offline hate targeting all communities, saying Australia needs to move from reacting to crises towards preventing harm. (The Herald)

Media Coverage

ABC News | Trillionaire Elon Musk partly to blame for anti-Jewish hatred on X, royal commission hears

The Herald | New study shows persistent anti-Jew and anti-Muslim hate in Australia

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The post OHPI Royal Commission evidence shows infrastructural failure to manage online hate first appeared on Online Hate Prevention Institute.