00:00Hundreds of posts spewing hate and lies.
00:07Tracking antisemitism and Islamophobia means diving into some of the worst parts of the internet.
00:13It's rough. I think all of us who do the social media monitoring work, we all struggle with it from time to time.
00:21There can be a personal risk for people involved, so we're not using this researcher's name.
00:27But she's part of a team going online for an hour at a time to record offensive content.
00:33So having real people look at this means we see things that artificial intelligence won't.
00:40There's a lot of dog whistles that are used, coded language, things like that.
00:45Firstly, thank you for all the work on getting the report where it is.
00:49The online Hate Prevention Institute has documented a significant rise in Islamophobia and antisemitism
00:56following October 7 and the war in Gaza.
00:59Our work looked at ten different social media platforms and the increase is at different levels,
01:06but it's up significantly on every single platform.
01:09It's the mainstream, it's the extremes, it's everything is just up.
01:14Dr Andre Obla recently used the findings to run training for police from across the world, including Australia.
01:21Looking at both anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hate, identifying it, what are the common themes and ways it expresses itself,
01:28and looking at what the platforms are doing, where the gaps are, where law enforcement can currently step in,
01:35and where maybe we need to start thinking about new powers that may be needed.
01:40The Institute's report into Islamophobia and racism against Palestinians and Arabs looked at data from October to February.
01:48It found 1,169 offensive items over 160 hours of searching.
01:56Researchers believe it represents an increase of at least 400%.
02:01An earlier report tracked antisemitism in the same way over the same period.
02:07It found 2,898 items, an increase of more than 530%.
02:15A third comparative report will be released in coming months.
02:19What we see is first it starts online, then it moves into the real world.
02:27Heshi Adalist has been voluntarily cleaning off antisemitic graffiti in Melbourne, including this call to kill Jewish people.
02:38And we already have so much hate in this world already.
02:41If I would have said kill all Muslims or kill all Christians, I would have gone out and cleaned it.
02:45It's more about the hate.
02:47But when it said kill the Jews, since I am Jewish, it was a bit more personal.
02:53He says antisemitism is taking a toll on people.
02:56They're right now getting targeted because they're just Jewish, and that hurts a lot.
03:01People at work, even at their homes, are being targeted online just because they're Jewish.
03:08We also got another case where there was some workplace discrimination.
03:12Elsewhere in the city, Abdu Rafi Suwano has been offering emotional and legal support to victims of Islamophobia.
03:20It's been extremely intense and horrible.
03:23It feels for our entire community that we've been going through a collective and unending trauma.
03:29And while we're crying for our brothers and sisters overseas, we're also seeing the direct impacts on the ground here.
03:35He says it's important to be able to help.
03:38I wouldn't say it feels good. I would say it feels necessary.
03:41One recommendation is to increase the powers of Australia's e-safety commissioner.
03:46The online regulator can only address attacks on individuals, not groups of people.
03:52But we need e-safety to be able to take down such content as well, so they need to be able to issue a notice.
03:58And they can't do that unless the government updates the legislation and actually gives them that power.
04:03These are important fundamental questions around lawmaking.
04:06My understanding is the government, that's the very reason the government is conducting the online safety review.
04:11Peter Carlyle has just been appointed the government's special envoy for social cohesion.
04:16People should be able to disagree peacefully on issues without resorting to the personal attack on someone based on their identity.
04:24The online hate prevention institute is hoping to get funding to run its social media study again one year on, to see if levels have fallen.
04:34In the interim, they're asking people to help fight back by reporting offensive posts to platforms when they see them.
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