The Online Hate Prevention Institute was founded 11 years ago today on January 23, 2012. We are Australia’s only national charity dedicated to tackling all forms of online hate and extremism, and in those 11 years we have led the way both in Australia and internationally.
As the problem of online hate and extremism has grown ever more urgent, we’ve remained at the leading edge of efforts to tackle the problem. Our work has made a real difference:
- We’ve secured the removal of thousands of items of hate speech
- We’ve also secured the timely removal of terrorist content
- We’re had our recommendations to major platforms adopted as changed to their software
- We’ve influenced government policy to improve online safety and prevent government overreach
- We’ve addressed various parts of the United Nations and been cited in formal proceedings
- We’ve carried out world leading research
- We’ve publish over 350 briefings and report deconstructing hate
- We’ve developed and run training in Australia and internationally
- We’re represented the Australian Government internationally
- We’ve advised foreign governments and international bodies
- We’ve worked with interns and volunteers, given them new skills
Our work has addressed general racism, racism against our First Nations peoples, antisemitism and Holocaust denial, Islamophobia, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia, anti-Asian xenophobia and racism, attacks on veterans, as well as trolling, griefing, Covid inspired hate, violent extremism, and more.
We are currently planning for a major fundraising campaign through February to coincide with Safe Internet Day.
Last year over 10,000 people made a donation to support us during February thanks to PayPal featuring of us.
You of course don’t need to wait, and can donate now to celebrate our birthday!
Our most recent major project, carried out in partnership with the Australian Human Rights Commission and Meta, and resulted our report “Anti-Asian Racism in Australian Social Media” .
It was launched by Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner, Chin Tan, to a global audience at the IEEE Computer Society’s Tech Forum on Digital Platforms and Societal Harms. Highlights from the report were presented by our CEO, Dr Andre Oboler. Other speakers at the launch were Molina Asthana a co-founder of the Asian Australian Alliance, Jason Yat-sen Li MP from the NSW Parliament, and Josh Machin from Meta. We hope to soon make videos from the launch available.
The work draws on our experience with large scale work on topics like antisemitism and Islamophobia, while applying it to anti-Asian hate, a rapidly growing problem in social media that has not had enough attention.
We’ve just completed a merger, absorbing Exit Australia and New Zealand as a project of the Online Hate Prevention Institute. It’s founder, Matthew Quinn, has become our new Director of Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism.
Exit has been running since 2015 and in that time has helped redirect over 200 people away from extremism, and helped 124 people leave extremism behind. The work of exist has helped save over 1,500 lives.
We’re please to help Exit continue their important work supporting those ready to leave hate and extremism behind. Joining forces further enhances our training and research work and ability to enhance community safety.
Through 2023 we are working on a major project online antisemitism project in partnership with the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the national peak Jewish community body in Australia.
In this project we are monitoring online antisemitism across a wide range of social media platforms and will be providing an interim report around the middle of the year. The current status of our data is shown to the right, with 45.3% of the content relating to Holocaust disinformation, 32.5% to traditional antisemitism, 17.9% to Israel related antisemitism, 3.4% inciting violence, and 1% other.
These numbers will change as the project progresses.
Our 11th year is looking to be busy, exciting, and impactful. If you are interested in what we do, please join our mailing list to stay informed. As social media just isn’t getting the message out like it used to, if you know others who may be interested in our efforts to build a safer internet, please send them here and ask them to sign up to stay informed.