To mark the UN designated International Day for Countering Hate Speech, respond to rising antisemitism and anti-Muslim hate since October 2023, and help address the breakdown in social cohesion, the Online Hate Prevention Institute, together with the Online Hate Task Force, have co-led a group of civil society organisations in creating the United Against Hate campaign.
The campaign invites elected representatives and officials from a number of countries to come together in reporting both anti-Muslim hate and antisemitism on three social media platforms: Instagram, X (Twitter), and YouTube. Each person reported both antisemitism and anti-Muslim hate on each of the platfroms. Each person was given a different set of content to report, each contributing their part to the overall effort.
The campain aims to:
- Raised awareness of online hate and its nature by showing the elected representatives and officials current examples of hate that is online today.
- Strengthened social cohesion addressing both antisemitism and anti-Muslim hate online. The normalisation of hate online is a shared problem to address together.
- Shone sunlight on the problem, making public the poor response rates by the platforms after the content was reported.
This project comes in the last weeks of the Australian financial year. We urge Australians looking to make an impact on this rising hate to make a tax-deductible donation to support our work before June 30th.
Data from the Campaign
The initial 140 items reported were in English and evenly split between anti-Muslim hate and antisemitism. A further 21 items (almost all on antisemitism) in languages other than English were then added. These items were mostly from South America.
The data is fairly evenly split between Instagram (58 items), X / Twitter (57 items), and YouTube (46 items). 90 of the items relate to Antisemitism and 71 relate to anti-Muslim hate. At the time of writing YouTube had removed two items, Instagram 1 items, and X had limited the reach for 4 extreme example of hate but refused to remove them.
The camapigns data page also looks at the transparency reports of the companies and concludes that:
Addressing online hate speech has become more difficult due to decisions of some tech companies to alter their approach to tackling hate speech. X has dramatically reduced actions removing hate speech and closing accounts dedicated to hate speech since Elon Musk bought the company and has greatly reduced its transparency. Our estimates suggest a reduction of 98.1% in account closures and a reduction of between 72% and 58% in content removals for hate speech on X compared to some years ago. On Instagram Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts to recalibrate and allow more hate speech to remain online are starting to show with a 29% reduction in the automatic removal of hate speech compared to a year ago. YouTube continues to improve its efforts.
Content examples
The following are just a few of the examples of online hate collected in this campaign. A larger set of examples can be seen on the campaign website’s examples page.
Example 1
| Platform | Hate | Antisemitism | Online now? | yes |
Text reads “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Gas (1941)” and the image is of Daniel Radcliff (who played Harry Potter and is Jewish) in a military uniform (an image taken from the movie “My Boy Jack”). This is an example of Holocaust trivialisation, a form of Holocaust distortion. Such content invites and encourages further antisemitism.
Comments on this includes:
- “He’s missing the ϟϟ scar” (the double lighting bolt is the SS symbol)
- “Where the 卍 scar”.
- “Harry Potter and the final solution”
- “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Auschwitz” (repeated many times)
- “Harry Potter and the Aryan Blood Prince”
- “Harry Potter and the gassed child”
- “Harry Potter and the Ash from the Jews”
- “Platform 9¾ to Auschwitz (crying with laughter emoji)”
- “Harry potter and the schutzstaffel”
These sort of comments rehabilitate Nazism and create acceptability for antisemitism in society.
Example 2
| Platform | Hate | Anti-Muslim | Online now? | yes |
This post was made on March 4th (Australian time), right after the 2025 Mannheim car attack in which a 40-year-old German citizen Alexander Scheuermann allegedly killed 2 people and injured 14 with a vehicle. Scheuermann is not a Muslim, and allegedly has links to the “Ring Bund”, a neo-Nazi arms trafficking group. This was an attempt to use a mass casualty event to recirculate content blaming Muslims to incite hate in response to the event.
Comments posted in response to this image include:
- “Always blame Islam. There is no such thing as Islamophobia.”
- “Fuck that! Theirs is a hateful evil religion. It began with 9/11 for me as it probably did for many Americans. It’s not irrational when we are constantly attacked by their twisted beliefs.”
- “Phobia is an irrational fear of something. These cretins give us all the reasoning and fuel to fear them. (angry emoji)”
- “Phobia? It’s not a phobia, we aren’t scared. We just know that muzzies for the most part a pieces of garbage.”
Example 3
| Platform | X | Hate | Anti-Muslim | Online now? | yes |
This content is directly inciting violence.
Example 4
| Platform | X | Hate | Antisemitism | Online now? | yes |
This is a trope of calling all Jews terrorists. It also Hitler painting “You are Jewish” while holding a mirror, a convoluted Holocaust inversion message.
Example 5
| Platform | YouTube | Hate | Antisemitism | Online now? | yes |
The audio to this video is from a broadcast on November 18, 2000, by Dr William Luther Pierce III, an American neo-Nazi leader who founded the white supremacist group the National Alliance. He also authored “The Turner Diaries” a fictional story that inspired multiple hate crimes, including the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. He died in 2002, yes his content continues to be re-uploaded to YouTube.
The video itself starts with racism against Black people, beforme moving on to blame the Jews for immigration, civil rights, feminism, etc. while also promoting other classic antisemitic tropes like claiming the Jews control the media.
Example 6
| Platform | YouTube | Hate | Anti-Muslim | Online now? | yes |
In this video a former Muslim explains why she left Islam, that part is free speech. When she crosses into “the real Islam is ISIS” it becomes a misrepresentation that demonises all Muslims. The title, “She left islam after finding out how oppressive muhammed and his people are” also emphasises this, being about people, not theology or beliefs.
Comments from our reporters
Here are a selection of statements from our reporters. More can be seen on the campaign website’s statement page.
ANDRE OBOLER, CEO of the Online Hate Prevention Institute
“In 2025 we’re seeing efforts to tackle online hate going backwards. Improvements to AI are being abused to generate more engaging hate speech. This rapidly created synthetic content is often disposable and makes anti-hate technologies, like digital fingerprinting, largely obsolete. Rather than rising to the technical challenges, we see companies pulling back, reducing trust and safety efforts, and seeking growth over safety. Today, the International Day for Countering Hate Speech, is a day to take notice of this harm and the threat it poses to social cohesion and public safety. It is a day to renew our commitments to change that.” – Dr Andre Oboler, CEO of the Australian based Online Hate Prevention Institute
AFTAB MALIK, Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia
“There has been an alarming rise in online hate in the past few years. While social media platforms provide a wealth of information and resources to people around the globe, and allow people to connect and communicate wherever they are, they are also awash with material that incites hatred and violence against Muslims, dehumanises them, and views them as a predatory, cultural threat. I urge social media platforms to act upon the complaints that they receive about such material, and that the recommendations made in the Online Safety Act Review will be considered and actioned by the Government, thus making the online space safe for everyone. Spreading hatred and the mistrust of Australian Muslims and of Islam encourages people to act on fear instead of fact, and legitimises prejudice and dehumanisation.”
A longer statement is available on the website of the Special Envoy for Combating Islamohpobia.
ANTHONY HOUSEFATHER MP, Member of Parliament for Mount Royal, Canada
“In 2020 I was part of a group of legislators that formed the InterParliamentary Task Force to Combat Online Antisemitism because we saw a disturbing increase in hate online. For several years we made progress in convincing social media platforms to enforce their own rules but today we see that trend reversing. Hate online leads to hate in the streets and social media platforms have an absolute obligation to respect their own standards.”
MARION LALISSE, European Commission Coordinator for combating anti-Muslim hatred
“Numerous recent anti-Muslim and antisemitic hate and terrorist crimes in real life were related to online hatred on social media, as for instance in the case of the stabbing of Aboubakar Cissé or the shooting of Hichem Miraoui. Perpetrators also radicalize online. Today, we are united against hate to raise awareness about the scourge of online hatred.”
Official UN Resources on the day
- The official UNESCO page for the day can be seen here
- The official United Nations page for the day can be seen here
Support this work
You can support the work of the Online Hate Prevention Institute in tackling all forms of online by making a one off or reoccuring donation. We do a diffcult job on a very small and very tight budget and all support is greately appreciated.
Your help sharing this page and the campaign website are greatly appreciated.