• NAIDOC WEEK IN FOCUS – The Online Hate Spiral Targeting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples

    NAIDOC WEEK IN FOCUS  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…

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  • Racism isn’t funny

    Lisa Jane Spencer has been using Instagram to engage in racism against multiple parts of the Australian community while collecting donations to support her “creative work”. It’s not funny. It’s not legal. It needs to stop.

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  • X does not enforce its policy on hate-speech

    A few days ago, at the start of September 2024, Brazil banned X (Twitter) following Elon Musk’s refusal to suspend what Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes described as far-right accounts spreading misinformation. Brazil’s supreme court voted to ban the platform and Moraes has given companies like Apple and Google five days to remove…

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  • Racism towards First Nations people on January 26

    On 26 January, 4 OHPI Analysts documented racism against First Nations people on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok. Our findings are summarised here.

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  • Reflections on reviewing social media comments from the referendum

    By Matthew Desmond Smith I joined the team at the Online Hate Prevention Institute in January to work on a project investigating online racism and disinformation from the referendum on The Voice. This article shared my initial experience of this ongoing project and the data we saw. The project saw a team of 12 of…

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  • Have a respectful January 26, 2022

    Today, January 26th, is a day of competing narratives. Whatever your focus on this day, we urge all Australians to also take time to reflect on the perspective of others. Indigenous perspective For many Indigenous Australians today is known as a Day of Mourning, Survival Day or Invasion Day. It commemorates the start of what…

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  • More Racism on Twitter

    As part of our March 2020 campaign tackling racism against Indigenous Australians we have looked at Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. In this article we look at a second problematic Twitter account. The account “The Abowaffen Division” (@abodivision) is another fake Aboriginal account, this one more overtly linked to the far-right and more specifically the Alt-Right. With this fake…

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  • Racism against Indigenous Australians on Twitter

    Earlier this month we looked at racism against Indigenous Australians on Instagram and Facebook. In this briefing we look at Twitter. Positive use: IndigenousX Twitter has been used very successfully as an anti-racism tool that gives Indigenous Australians a voice, most notably by IndigenousX (see website). It is based around the IndigenousX Twitter account setup…

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  • Aboriginal Memes on Facebook

    We first tackled online racism against Indigenous Australians back in 2012. At that time, the problem was on Facebook – as a number of pages had been created encouraging the creation and sharing of racist memes targeting Indigenous Australians. After a bumpy start, Facebook has got far better at tackling this problem, but the issue…

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  • Racism Against Indigenous Australians on Instagram

    Instagram not only hosts racist content, but entire accounts dedicated to sharing racist memes and which encourage others to do the same.

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