As printed in Sydney Morning Herald and The Age 13 May 2026:
Dr Andre Oboler, chief executive officer of the Online Hate Prevention Institute, told the commission that most of his body’s work is dedicated to tracking antisemitism.
“There are a number of reasons for that. One is because it is such a big part of online hate. Another one is that there is actually more energy and work in responding to online antisemitism than there is in other forms of online hate,” Oboler said.
“There just aren’t the same number of conferences, parliamentary hearings, etc, and I am talking globally. I think there has been one meeting of special envoys on Islamophobia, and we were able to connect Australia’s special envoy to the European envoy.
“But you compare that to antisemitism, where there’s regular stuff going on around the world.”
Oboler outlined some search phrases the institute uses to monitor for online antisemitism content, such as “holohoax”, a Holocaust denial term, as well as a more recent term, “kiss the wall”, which is often used when politicians visit Israel and take part in a Jewish religious practice of kissing the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
“This is used as an antisemitic trope to say ‘oh look, they went to Israel, they kissed the wall, and therefore they are controlled by the Jews’, so ‘kiss the wall’ as a phrase is something we use as an entry point.”
Oboler told the commission that social media giant X, formerly Twitter, was “behaving very much like the far-right platforms”.
Oboler shared his analysis of the “density”, or prevalence, of antisemitism on social media platforms, where X rated second, only behind free speech fringe platform Gab, which has widely been criticised for hosting hateful content.
Longitudinal data also showed current antisemitism rates across all platforms are higher than the fivefold spike observed immediately after the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas.
Oboler, an Australian envoy to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said X had “one of the lowest increases” in antisemitism before and after October 7 because “it was already the most prevalent platform for antisemitism to start with”.