This briefing includes themes of animal cruelty, child exploitation, sexual abuse, and suicide. If you have seen disturbing content online or are having distressing thoughts, you can reach Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636.

The Australian Federal Police has published a guide to Understanding Sadistic Online Exploitation for parents and carers, which can be accessed here.

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has issued a Reporting Steps flowchart for what to do when you see distressing content online, which can be accessed here.

For several years, law enforcement agencies globally have warned about the emergence of online extremist networks that target vulnerable individuals – primarily minors – and coerce them into acts of sexual humiliation, animal cruelty, violence, and self-harm.

The dangers posed by these networks are now being scrutinised in two concurrent court proceedings in different parts of the world. Both cases are examining accountability for the tragic death by suicide of Jay Taylor, a 13 year-old transgender boy from Seattle who was targeted on Discord by a leader of the online network known as 764.

In January 2026, a German court began hearing the case against Shahriar J., a 21-year-old German-Iranian medical student who operated under the alias ‘White Tiger’. He faces 204 charges involving more than 30 victims, including murder in connection with Jay’s death and five counts of attempted murder.

The following month, Jay’s parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit in the United States against the communication platform Discord.

The facts of this case (below) are deeply disturbing and raise urgent questions about responsibility for online abuse, as well as what governments, police agencies, and technology platforms can do to prevent similar tragedies from occurring in the future. 

The tragic death of Jay Taylor

On 16 January 2022, Jay made a post on Discord looking for gay or transgender friends who shared his interest in craft projects. He was contacted by a 12-year-old girl located in Finland who had been subjected to months of coercion, blackmail, and escalating pressure to self-harm by White Tiger. When she expressed her desire to stay alive, she was told by White Tiger that in order to do so, she would have to find somebody else to die in her place.

Under White Tiger’s direction and control, the girl began communicating with Jay. She identified Jay as a vulnerable target given his history of anorexia, depression and suicidal ideation, and pressured him to enter a joint suicide pact. Impersonating the girl, White Tiger provided detailed instructions on how to commit the act while on a video call with other 764 network members. White Tiger encouraged Jay to live-stream his suicide on Instagram which took place in the early morning of 17 January, only one day after he had begun his search on Discord for friendship and community.

Jay’s parents initially had no knowledge of the online events preceding his death. They learned what had happened after a teenage girl in Australia entered a chat in which White Tiger and others were sharing the recording of his death. The girl, who had herself been targeted by 764, located Jay’s father and sent him the video.

Jay’s case demonstrates one of the most disturbing features of these online networks: that children who have been groomed and abused themselves can be coerced into recruiting and manipulating new victims. It highlights the cross-border nature of the network, with victims, offenders and witnesses located in different countries, making detection, investigation and prosecution more difficult. It also shows how abuse can move rapidly across platforms – from initial contact and coordination on Discord to livestreaming of violence on Instagram.

The 764 network

764 is a decentralised, global network that operates within a broader online ecosystem known as ‘the Com’ (short for ‘the Community’). 

The Com consists of overlapping online spaces that are associated with nihilistic violent extremism (NVE), a form of extremism in which violence, cruelty, and social disruption are treated as ends in themselves rather than as tools for achieving a political objective. Elements within the Com have been linked to accelerationism, an ideology which encourages acts of chaos and destruction as a means to bring about the downfall of society. Some parts of the network use neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and other extremist imagery.

The original 764 group was founded during the COVID pandemic by Bradley Cadenhead, then a 15-year-old living in Texas, who named it after the first three digits of his local postcode. Cadenhead adopted his tactics of grooming and extortion from another Discord community called CVLT. After Cadenhead’s arrest in 2021, 764 split into several groups that retained similar imagery (below), methods and goals. New figures emerged within the network, including White Tiger.

764 typically recruits participants and targets victims on online platforms where young individuals play games, socialise or seek companionship – such as Discord, Telegram, Roblox, Minecraft, Twitch and Steam. Members deliberately target children with mental health challenges or marginalised identities, including LGBTQ+ youth. In some cases, victims are offered in-game currency in exchange for intimate images before being directed to more private online spaces where they are blackmailed.

The sadistic online exploitation (SOE) cycle often evolves as follows:

Targeting a vulnerable user between 8-17 years of age
↓
Building trust or posing as a friend or romantic interest
↓
Obtaining an intimate image or personal information
↓
Threatening exposure to family, friends or school
↓
Demanding further sexual, violent or degrading material
↓
Escalating to animal cruelty, torture or self-harm
↓
Recording and circulating the material within the network for clout

Sextortion is one of the network’s key methods. As noted above, a 764 member may pose as a romantic interest and gradually persuade their target to provide an intimate image or personal information. The victim is then shamed, isolated and threatened with exposure unless further demands are met. Unlike financially motivated sextortion, the objective is generally not money but control, humiliation and escalating violence. Authorities have warned that members are increasingly encouraging victims to commit deadly acts, including suicide, school shootings and other mass-casualty attacks.

Within 764, influence is often tied to the extremity of the abuse a member can make a victim perform. In this sense, violence is also a source of power and influence. The material collected is stored in a ‘lorebook’ which acts as a type of digital currency, and is used to recruit participants and build status. 

An emerging extremist threat

The 764 network forms part of a broader online extremist threat that is gaining increasing attention from child-protection, cybercrime and counterterrorism authorities. On 6 March 2025, the FBI issued a public warning about a sharp increase in activity by 764 and other violent online networks operating in the United States and internationally. By November 2025, the FBI was investigating over 350 people across the United States suspected of involvement with 764 or related networks.

Australia has also made the online extremist threat a national priority. On 29 October 2025, the Australian Federal Police launched Taskforce Pompilid to identify and disrupt online criminal networks targeting young Australians. At the time of its launch, the AFP said it had identified 59 alleged offenders in Australia and that joint operations had resulted in nine arrests overseas and three domestically.

A growing number of international cases demonstrate the range and seriousness of the conduct linked to the network:

In July 2026, Alexis Aldair Chavez was sentenced to 40 years’ imprisonment for racketeering and child-exploitation offences. Chavez was an administrator of 8884, a NVE network related to 764.

In February 2024, a 14-year-old boy in Canada was charged with producing, possessing and distributing child sexual abuse material, distributing intimate images without consent, and making explosives. 

In January 2025, British teenager and 764 member Cameron Finnigan pled guilty to encouraging or assisting suicide, possessing material for terrorist purposes, and possessing child sexual abuse material. Finnigan referred to himself online as ‘Hitler’s child’ and had discussed plots with other members to carry out ‘terror week’.

In April 2025, US authorities arrested Leonidas Varagiannis and Prasan Nepal, who were accused of leading a core subgroup known as 764 Inferno and operating an international child-exploitation enterprise. 

In May 2025, US authorities arrested a 14-year-old boy from Oregon who was accused of planning an explosives attack and mass shooting at a shopping centre in Washington. The FBI said the teenager had shared detailed attack plans online and ABC News reported that he had pledged allegiance to 764.

In October 2025, US prosecutors charged 21-year-old 764 leader Baron Martin with participation in a child-exploitation enterprise as well as conspiracy to kill, kidnap or maim a person overseas. The indictment names nine victims, eight aged between 11-15. Martin was also charged with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, the first such charge against an alleged 764 member. 

The diversity of these cases raises questions about whether 764 should be treated primarily as a criminal network, an extremist movement or be formally designated as a terrorist organisation.

To sanction or not to sanction?

In December 2025, Canada became the first country to designate 764 as a terrorist entity, giving its authorities stronger powers to investigate, disrupt and prosecute activities connected with the network. No other country has formally designated 764 as yet, but New Zealand has designated the Order of Nine Angles, an extremist organisation linked to the broader 764 ecosystem.

The treatment of the Terrorgram Collective could serve as a model for other countries considering whether to sanction 764. Terrorgram is a decentralised online network that operates primarily through channels on the messaging platform Telegram. The United States designated Terrorgram and three of its leaders in January 2025, Australia listed it as a terrorist organisation in June 2025, and Canada and New Zealand followed in December. Its designation demonstrates that an online network does not need conventional headquarters or a rigid hierarchy to be treated as a terrorist entity.

Sanctioning 764 could have practical benefits. Depending on the country, designation may criminalise participation or support, enable asset freezes, and grant specialised investigative powers. It would also signal the seriousness and scale of the network’s conduct and warn potential participants that involvement may carry terrorism-related consequences. 

However, Terrorgram presents a more robust case for designation. The organisation espouses a white supremacist and accelerationist ideology and openly provides guidance and instruction for terrorist attacks. By contrast, 764 is more ideologically varied: some participants embrace nihilism, neo-Nazism or accelerationism, while others appear motivated primarily by sexual sadism, cruelty, status or belonging. For these participants, they are not necessarily committing violence to advance an ideological cause, and a terrorist designation might actually be counterproductive, enhancing the notoriety sought by participants and increasing the perceived status of the network.

764 is also more fragmented. It has no stable leadership, formal membership or clear hierarchy, and its participants continually form new groups under different names. Designating 764 may therefore just target a label that can easily be abandoned or replaced without disrupting the underlying network.

Cross-border challenges

Whether or not 764 is formally designated as a terrorist organisation, disrupting it presents a separate practical challenge: its activities routinely cross national and platform boundaries. A victim may be in one country, the offender in another and an intermediary or witness in a third, while the relevant communications and account data are held by technology companies elsewhere.

The investigation into White Tiger demonstrates both the importance and the limitations of international law enforcement cooperation. The German case began after the FBI, while investigating Jay Taylor’s death, traced White Tiger to Hamburg and alerted German authorities. US investigators had identified Shahriar J. as their suspect by mid-2022 and presented their evidence to German police in February 2023. However, he was not arrested until June 2025, more than three years after Jay’s death. 

The reason for the delay was because, according to German law, the FBI material could not be used as evidence in a German court, requiring the investigation to begin again from scratch. This caused considerable frustration among the US investigators, who feared that White Tiger remained free to target further victims. 

The White Tiger investigation shows that identifying an offender is only the first step; the greater challenge may be turning evidence gathered across several countries and platforms into timely action. It also raises a related question: what responsibility should those platforms bear when their services are used to find, isolate and exploit vulnerable children?

Discord’s liability

The Taylor family’s lawsuit focuses on the responsibility of the platform on which Jay was targeted. The case does not merely argue that harmful actors used and communicated on Discord but that Discord’s design, settings, and limited safety measures enabled 764 to locate, isolate and cause harm to vulnerable children.

The complaint states that Discord promotes itself as a place where socially isolated people can find friendship, belonging and community, and permits children as young as 13 to join. The family alleges that, during the relevant period, Discord had no meaningful age or identity-verification system and employed, at most, 79 trust and safety staff. It argues that Discord’s “unmoderated” model, combined with its appeal to vulnerable young users, created conditions that attracted abusers and allowed organised exploitation to develop.

Discord is also designed around private and semi-private interactions, with most servers being small and invitation-only. Although these spaces offer privacy and community, their closed nature can make coordinated abuse harder for parents and platform moderators to detect. Discord does not record voice and video calls, and research suggests that the fleeting nature of real-time communication makes misconduct more difficult to document and investigate.

Jay’s family claims that Discord failed to take reasonable steps to prevent or disrupt child exploitation despite the foreseeable danger to young users. They note that Discord had received numerous warnings of the danger posed by 764 – for example, in July 2021, a 15-year-old girl livestreamed a suicide attempt after being tormented by 764 members. She had reportedly been coerced into carving offenders’ usernames and extremist symbols, including swastikas, into her skin. Jay was targeted approximately six months later.

Government authorities have since raised similar concerns about Discord’s approach to child safety. In May 2026, the Texas Attorney General sued the company, alleging that its product design exposed children to predators while misleading parents and users about the safety of the platform. The lawsuit cites several incidents of violence and abuse, and argues that these were foreseeable consequences of inadequate age verification, unsafe default settings and a largely reactive approach to moderation. Discord disputes these allegations.

The court will ultimately determine Discord’s liability in the case of Jay’s death. But the broader policy question is whether a platform that invites young people to form private communities should be required to design those spaces around foreseeable child-safety risks. The issue is not simply whether Discord should have banned 764 under its rules, but whether it had systems in place capable of detecting and disrupting the network before abuse occurred at all.

The post Sadistic Online Networks Targeting Vulnerable Children first appeared on Online Hate Prevention Institute.

“One of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true” – George Orwell

Executive summary

The 2026 FIFA World Cup hosted old conspiracies in updated garb.

Disputed refereeing decisions, distrust of FIFA, and hostility towards Argentina were assembled into conspiratorial claims that a “Zionist” network had scripted the tournament. Lionel Messi’s visits to Israel and President Javier Milei’s support for Israel were presented as proof of secret influence over FIFA.

The narrative survived contradiction. Spain ultimately won the tournament, yet posts alleging Zionist control continued to circulate. Their reach reveals how major events allow antisemitic ideas to travel through sporting commentary, humour and political solidarity. Event-driven hatred can move faster than systems built around reports submitted after publication.

From sporting grievance to conspiracy

George Orwell described international sport as “war minus the shooting”. Today, international football concentrates national identity, political history and tribal rivalry into a single global spectacle. The World Cup’s scale intensifies that dynamic: every disputed decision can be read as a narrative about power and control.

Distrust in FIFA is well-earned, the peak body mired in decades of corruption. Arguments about Video Assistant Refereeing (VAR) and general refereeing standards, hydration breaks, and political access to referees, bridge pre-existing misgivings into modern political tensions and conspiracy theories.

These dynamics aren’t produced by focal events. They’re already there, waiting for controversy or emotionally charged moments to latch onto. The immediate aftermath of Argentina’s contentious 3–2 victory was like the breaking of a dam. A disallowed goal saw Egypt’s coach Hossam Hassan invoking FIFA’s anti-racism gesture. Supporters experienced the defeat as an injustice with geopolitical relevance, bolstered by centuries-old conspiracy theories about Jewish power and political interference.

Online accounts constructed the defeat as a morality play. Egypt became a proxy for Palestine and Argentina became a proxy for Israel. A football result was described as organised dispossession. “Israel gave them the call”, read one comment that received more than 14,000 likes.

A widely-endorsed comment converts a disputed refereeing decision into Israeli interference.

The conspiracy’s architecture

The story developed through a short chain of association:

·    FIFA is corrupt, so major results may be manipulated.

·    Argentina benefited from contentious decisions, so its progress must have been arranged.

·    Milei supports Israel and Messi has visited Israel, so Argentina becomes “Zionist”.

·    A “Zionist” victory becomes evidence that Jews secretly control FIFA and global institutions.

Each step removes the need for evidence. Public meetings, photographs and political statements become fragments of a hidden system. Fabricated claims then complete the story: Milei was described as Netanyahu’s cousin, a French referee was falsely identified as an Orthodox Jew, and Argentina was accused of transferring Patagonia to Israel.

A “promised 3,000 years ago” joke imports an established antisemitic meme into football discourse.

Four recurring narratives

1. Argentina cheated

Claims that Argentina received favourable fixtures or refereeing decisions were stated as settled fact. Disagreement over individual calls expanded into certainty that the entire competition had been arranged. This provided the bridge from ordinary sporting suspicion to allegations of political control.

2. Argentina represented Israel

Milei’s description of himself as a strongly Zionist president and photographs of Messi in Israel were circulated as evidence that Argentina acted for Israel. Images of Messi with other political leaders received little attention because they disrupted the narrative.

A post describes Argentina and Messi as “Israeli lapdogs” and Milei as a “globalist Jewish weirdo”.

3. Egypt‘s loss as a proxy for injustice and dispossession

Posts cast Egypt as the moral representative of Palestine and Argentina as the agent of a hostile global order. The sporting contest became a battle between humanity and evil. Argentina’s three goals in fifteen minutes disappeared from accounts organised around theft and dispossession.

Football is reframed as a struggle between Palestine and a hostile international system, controlled by shadowy forces.

4. Jewish association proved control

Messi’s visit to the Western Wall, his meeting with Netanyahu and Milei’s support for Israel were edited into montages alleging that Argentina had been “promised” the World Cup. The inference followed a classical antisemitic structure: any relationship with Jews becomes evidence of covert Jewish power.

A post presents Netanyahu as secretly backing Argentina’s World Cup campaign.

Reach and amplification

The examples were distributed through high-reach accounts and recommendation systems. A video asking whether the World Cup was rigged received millions of views. An imam with 825,000 followers drew approximately 2.4 million views for a video addressing whether supporting Messi was religiously permissible because he was allegedly a Zionist. Comments pushing the conspiracy beneath mainstream sports posts received tens of thousands of endorsements.

The comments section performed a central role. Publishers could frame a post around sport or refereeing while users supplied the antisemitic explanation beneath it. High engagement then increased the visibility of the claim and produced the appearance of consensus.

A high-reach religious influencer asks whether support for Messi is permissible because he is allegedly a Zionist.

Why event-driven antisemitism spreads

Major events provide three conditions that favour rapid transmission: intense attention, strong group identities and uncertainty about contested outcomes. Antisemitic explanations arrive as ready-made causal stories. They identify a secret actor, connect unrelated events and convert defeat into deliberate persecution.

The format protects the prejudice. Memes, jokes and sporting insults can carry claims about Jewish control without adopting the tone of ideological propaganda. Users encounter the conspiracy through familiar cultural material, often beneath content produced by outlets and personalities they already follow.

Implications

·    Antisemitic conspiracies gain mainstream reach by attaching themselves to global events.

·    Repeated claims about Jewish control weaken public trust in sport, media and civic institutions.

·    Online abuse can migrate from prominent individuals such as Messi and Milei towards Jewish communities generally.

·    Reactive manual moderation arrives after high-engagement narratives have already shaped public interpretation.

OHPI will publish a longer-form follow-up to this analysis in the coming weeks, examining further examples of this narrative’s spread and setting out potential policy responses for platforms and institutions.

Media contact:
Online Hate Prevention Institute
Email: joshua@ohpi.org.au
Website: www.ohpi.org.au

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The post Antisemitism at the 2026 FIFA World Cup: Argentina Case Study first appeared on Online Hate Prevention Institute.

Content Sensitivity Warning

This briefing discusses the deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in police custody, including specific cases involving fatal violence. It contains direct examples of racist, dehumanising, and hateful online commentary, reproduced for analytical purposes. 

Readers are advised that names and images of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have died are used in this briefing, in line with their portrayal in public reporting and existing media coverage of these cases.

If this content raises concerns for your safety or wellbeing, support is available through 13YARN(13 92 76), a crisis support line for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and Lifeline (13 11 14).

As NAIDOC Week comes to a close, OHPI has conducted dedicated analysis focused on the harmful online discourse proliferating around high-profile killings affecting Indigenous Australian communities across the country

In 2019, Kumanjayi Walker was killed by a member of the Northern Territory police, an institution that was later found to bear the hallmarks of institutional racism. A coronial inquest later found the officer held racist views, and was dismissed by police in the midst of a murder trial, from which he was acquitted. There was also the 2022 fatal collision that killed Jai Wright. The case resulted in the first-ever conviction of a NSW Police officer in relation to a death of an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person in custody. Most recently, Kumanjayi White was killed while being apprehended by police in a supermarket in Alice Springs.

Despite their shocking nature, these deaths are nothing new, and are echoes of uncomfortable, unspoken realities about Australia’s past that have been left unaddressed and are now spilling out into the digital realm. This hatred and toxicity has marred Australia since the arrival of the First Fleet and the brutal treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples that followed.

The circumstances surrounding each killing discussed in this briefing are unique, and the facts of each case are worth exploring in detail in their own right. Rather than re-litigating the specific facts of these preventable tragedies, this briefing instead explores the drivers and dynamics behind the charged online discourse that surrounds them. In drawing attention to these cases, we believe important lessons can be drawn about how harmful narratives (at times spurred by traditional media) are further exacerbated by the dynamics of the digital arena, where abusive content and their toxic comment sections thrive, and where mis/disinformation spread freely. It is this poorly governed digital public square that makes platforms feel unsafe for users, and which is detrimental to wider society.

The cases above all follow a similar pattern, one where a death at the hands of the state becomes the flashpoint for a recurring cycle of public reaction. This cycle typically unfolds as follows:

1. Avoidable tragedy or atrocity
2. Community outrage
3. Backlash to that outrage (online hate)
   1. steps 2 & 3 repeat in a continuous, self-reinforcing feedback loop, resulting in further toxic online discourse
4. Institutional attempts at accountability and justice
5. Where those institutional steps fail, further social backlash and instability. 

Note on Step 3: This step is sometimes a precursor to 1 and 2, and frequently recurs throughout steps 4 and 5 as well. Online hatred is near-inevitable in the aftermath of atrocities of this nature. As seen with the Bondi Beach attack, online spaces can flood with hatred towards the victimised community almost immediately, often before that community has had any opportunity to express its own grief or outrage. 

These incidents, particularly once they go viral, leave long lasting ripple effects that combine in the digital space to shape the wider landscape of online discourse. While institutional accountability can take years to materialise (Kumanjayi Walker’s coronial inquest findings were released in June 2025, 6 years after his death), these cases fester in the online zeitgeist throughout, fuelling shock-jocks and grifters who monetise culture-war content. 

The ‘digital’ and the ‘real’ world are now one and the same

Online platforms are taking steps away from automated moderation of online hate speech, increasingly leaving the reporting and moderation of harmful online discourse to individuals. In practice, this places the burden onto the people most likely to be the victims of that harmful speech, who are now responsible for reporting it themselves, with these reports often rejected and the harmful content remaining online. Where platforms do rely on AI for content moderation, significant questions remain about its safe implementation.

Research by the AHRC notes that the online world “creates a space of hypervisibility in which the ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ worlds overlap”. In this environment, the distinction between digital hate and real-world consequence is blurred, and hate seeps freely into people’s day-to-day lives.

A survey conducted by Macquarie University showed that 88% of Indigenous people witnessed examples of racism online. Much attention has already been paid to the marked rise in racist online rhetoric in the wake of the failed 2023 Voice referendum. High-profile Indigenous Australians are exposed constantly to racist abuse. Spend any time online and comment sections can be seen to devolve into spaces of unchallenged hostility toward entire groups. Indigenous public figures are subjected to degrading and racist material on a daily basis, posted by faceless accounts that evade accountability behind the veil of online anonymity.

The risks of this ungoverned ‘information superhighway’ are clear: without sensible governance, we are sleepwalking towards disaster. 

Defenders of the social media platforms and the gatekeepers of the online information space point out that they are not the ‘arbiters of truth’, and have no interest in limiting free speech on the basis of political opinion. But when the spaces these platforms control reinforce racist perceptions, the consequence can result in real-world violence.

Addressing these wicked problems facing our First Nations communities requires multi-pronged policy response across several domains, including areas like police accountability, media standards, and a general national commitment to truth telling. The scope of this briefing, however, is narrower. It examines the patterns identified above (particularly on X and Meta), whereby the character of Indigenous victims of violence is put on trial in the court of public opinion, alongside the broader stereotyping, victim-blaming, and hostile commentary that justifies or minimises these atrocities.

It is within this context that this briefing explores a central question: what do social media platforms owe their users? Unimpeded access to a digital space with no limits on what a user encounters? Or a restricted internet, where platforms censor content according to the preferences of individuals and governments?

This is a false binary. Between unrestricted access and heavy-handed censorship lies a middle ground where sensible governance has a role to play – namely, a digital duty of care.

Note: Some examples below do not meet the threshold for hate speech, and are instead illustrative of awful-but-lawful or ignorant content. Still, they reflect the deluge of online abuse that platforms have facilitated in the wake of these events.

Case Study 1 Kumanjayi Walker 

Zachary Rolfe killed Walker at point blank range after Walker stabbed him in the shoulder with a pair of scissors during a failed arrest. Rolfe was later acquitted on the grounds of self-defence. However, Rolfe’s inquest revealed the extent of his pre-existing racist attitudes and beliefs. He shared illegally obtained bodycam footage of physical altercations with Indigenous Australians, distributing it to family and friends as something to be proud of. Rolfe and the subculture that could develop at NT Police are a product of this heightened hateful environment, an embodiment of our collective failure to adequately protect Australia’s most vulnerable minority groups.

Mainstream coverage of the trial that led to Rolfe’s acquittal portrayed Walker as little more than an habitual criminal. The coverage was widely criticised, and described by the political editor at The West Australian as “unethical, insensitive, victim-blaming, irresponsible” and “a national disgrace”.

Digital coverage and online responses were no more forgiving. OHPI’s research has shown that events of this type correlate with distinct spikes in online hate. We can clearly see how the platform mechanics turn social media into a hate production line, exposing entire populations to hate at scale. 

SNAICC – National Voice for our Children, the national peak body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children (and a regular recipient of online hate on its posts) notes that Meta’s moderation tools are “often insufficient to address the scale and evolving nature of this issue.” Just with other types of online hate, commenters try avoid automatic filtering (via keywords) by deferring to innuendo, coded language or indirect hostility or the under guise of ‘political speech’ (figleafing). SNAICC’s submission to the Parliamentary Inquiry Into Racism, Hate and Violence Directied at Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People also contains, from page 37, a snippet of the deluge of hateful comments. 

As mentioned above, problematic online discourse surrounding the killing of Kumanjayi Walker involved stereotyping, victim-blaming, and hostile commentary that justified or minimised the killing. 

Example Post 1

Context: A post on X framing the deceased as ‘the boy nobody wanted’, claiming that race played no role in his death, contrary to the facts uncovered during his inquest. The account is Australia-based and posts prolifically: at the time of writing, the account has posted 21 tweets in the last 24 hours, about various hot button culture war issues. The divisive, AI slop-laden posts and reposts make sweeping generalisations about large groups of people, and decries the oncoming ‘complete societal breakdown in the UK’. The tweets also contain reposts of diatribes about the ‘monoculture’, and responses like the following.

Example Post 1 Comments

One response to the above tweet stereotypes Indigenous Australians as alcoholics, a trope historically used to dismiss and minimise Indigenous disadvantage, trauma, and the structural harms. By reducing a complex, historically rooted issue to an individual moral failing, the post trivialises the real and ongoing harm faced by Indigenous communities.

Comments from troll accounts, justifying the killing of an individual without any consideration of proportionality or justice: 

An additional comment that praises the actions of Rolfe: 

Case Study 2 Kumanjayi White

Northern Territory police killed 24-year-old Kumanjayi White, a Warlpiri man with cognitive disabilities, during a confrontation in a Coles supermarket. White’s death sparked outrage in Alice Springs, accompanied with a litany of online hatred directed towards White and the wider Indigenous community. 

Example Post 2

This news post from 26 May from the National Indigenous Times attracted comments that delivered ad hominem attacks against White, suggesting he was deserving of his fate. 

Example Post 2 Comments

The ad hominems below, against the victim of an extrajudicial police killing, are reminiscent of the online discourses proliferating after the killing of George Floyd. 

Example Post 2 Comments (cont.)

The next comments echo the same fallacious logic seen in analogous cases overseas, where minorities have been killed while committing trivial crimes. The underlying assumption is that because the victim was allegedly committing a petty crime, proportionality becomes irrelevant, justice has been served, and those responsible for an entirely avoidable extrajudicial killing are exonerated.  

Case Study 3: Jai Wright

A NSW Police officer was convicted over the death of Jai Kalani Wright, a 16-year-old boy killed when his motorbike collided with the unmarked police car. The case represents the first time a NSW Police officer was convicted in relation to a death in custody of an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person.

Example Post 3

This post about the conviction by digital newspaper the National Herald attracted 464 comments. The overwhelming majority are critical of Wright for having “committed a crime”, critical of “Indigenous parenting” (e.g. ‘teach your children to stop for police’), or critical of the reporting itself. The latter example shifts blame onto Wright for his own death, constituting victim-blaming, and it invokes the oft-repeated claim of “fake news” for information that doesn’t align with the commenter’s worldview – which amounts to atrocity denial or minimisation). 

Example Post 3 Comments

Example Post 4 (with Comments)

This reply to a post regarding Wright involves incitement to contempt and endorsement of harm towards First Nations people.  

This response attributes individual conduct to the racial group as a whole, and minimises the validity of the real suffering faced by Indigenous Australians. 

Potential ways forward in Digital Governance

The hope that accountability and positive social change are inevitable for preventable First Nations deaths in custody is undermined by wider social and technological dynamics, particularly around digital governance. While this ongoing inquiry continues, it has been 35 years since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, and since then, at least 630 people have died in custody.

The submissions that have been tendered to the more recent inquiry give insight into the severity and wickedness of the problem, as well as various informed perspectives and policy proposals to target the problem of online hatred. Some of these proposals could help in the combatting of all online hate, not just that directed towards First Nations communities. 

The AHRC have recommended the introduction of a digital duty of care, requiring social media companies to “identify, assess and mitigate foreseeable risks arising from recommender systems and monetisation practices that incentivise the amplification and normalisation of racist narratives”.The submission by Amy Rust of Jindawayni Consulting echoes this sentiment, suggesting the introduction of ‘duty of care obligations’ for organisations that host public comment platforms that facilitate racial abuse. In her words, ‘Freedom of expression does not require providing a platform for racial abuse’. 

The National Anti Racism Framework of 2024 recommends that the government introduce “effective legal protections against online hate, with particular attention given to regulation and enforcement against, and liability of, digital platforms” to be developed in consultation with First Nations and other “negatively racialised communities”. This could be achieved through the establishment of a “National Indigenous Digital Safety Taskforce”, as suggested by the Australian Multicultural Action Network’s submission. This calls for a mechanism through which governments, digital platforms, indigenous organisations and civil society groups collaborate on combatting online racism towards First Nations peoples. 

ASIO’s submission is frank in its assessment that “The increasing normalisation of, and access to, extremist content online in combination with high levels of intimidating, violent and intolerant rhetoric increases the exposure of extremist ideas and likely serves as a gateway for some individuals to violent extremist beliefs and ideals”… which could inspire individuals to commit violence.

Racism may have played a part in Walker’s death, but it doesn’t have to play a part in his legacy; the ongoing abuse faced by First Nations peoples after these senseless killings must be addressed. Before we can begin to have an honest and constructive national conversation and truth telling about the issues plaguing our First Nations people, we need to fix our feeds and our online public square, and put out the fires that are stoking real world violence. 

If this content raises concerns for your safety or wellbeing, support is available through13YARN(13 92 76), a crisis support line for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and Lifeline (13 11 14).

Media contact:
Online Hate Prevention Institute
Email: joshua@ohpi.org.au
Website: www.ohpi.org.au

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The post NAIDOC WEEK IN FOCUS – The Online Hate Spiral Targeting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples first appeared on Online Hate Prevention Institute.

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:
Online Hate Prevention Institute
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.”

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