Online hate analysts are calling for greater eSafety powers after study finds rise in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia

Researchers of online hate are calling for the remit of Australia's online regulator to be expanded, amid a "significant" increase in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

The Australian-based Online Hate Prevention Institute tracked offensive posts globally on 10 social media platforms for three months the beginning of the war in Gaza on October 7 last year.

The research has already been used for international police training, and the authors says it highlights a flaw in how the issue is tackled by the eSafety Commissioner.

The study, conducted with the Online Hate Task Force in Belgium, involved analysts working in one-hour blocks, seeking out anti-Semitism or Islamophobia.

"It's rough," an Australian researcher who worked on the project told the ABC.

"All of us who do the social media monitoring work, we all struggle with it from time to time."

There can be personal risk for those involved in the work, so she has asked for her name not to be used.

The team has used a "snowball" methodology where they find an offensive post and then click through to those interacting with it, working for an hour at a time to avoid becoming stuck in "an echo chamber".

"Having real people look at this means we see things that artificial intelligence won't," she said.

"There's a lot of dog whistles that are used, coded language, things like that."

Online hate speech has ballooned in past year

The lead author, Andre Oboler, who is also the Online Hate Prevention Institute's CEO, said hate speech targeting both groups was "up significantly on every single platform".

"It's the mainstream, it's the extreme — everything is just up," he said.

The institute's report into Islamophobia and racism against Palestinians and Arabs, found 1,169 offensive posts over 160 hours of searching, from October to February.

It divided the hate into 11 categories, including 'inciting violence against Muslims', 'Muslims as a cultural threat', 'demonising or dehumanising', 'xenophobia' and 'anti-Muslim jokes'.

The institute earlier released a report into anti-Semitism, which found 2,898 offensive items.

The posts were sorted into 27 groups, under four broad categories: 'traditional anti-Semitism, 'incitement to violence', 'Holocaust related content', and 'anti-Semitism related to Israel or Israelis'.

A third report comparing the two datasets will be released in coming months.

The institute had already been working on an anti-Semitism project before the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7 last year and the ensuing Gaza war, and so was able to compare the data.

It found the volume of offensive posts increased more than five-fold.

The institute did not have a dataset on Islamophobia for a comparison but said "through comparisons with other data we can state with certainty that religious vilification against Muslims has increased substantially".

The report estimated the increase had quadrupled.

The report into anti-Semitism was produced in partnership with the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the report into Islamophobia was produced partly with funding from the Australian government's Safe and Together Community Grants Program.

The institute is seeking funding to run the project again starting in October, to see if rates have changed one year on.

"If we don't have that measurement, we don't have the data to guide government policy, to guide the community, to support the community organisations that need to respond," Dr Oboler said.

It’s the latest in a series of measures showing an increase in discriminatory incidents.

In the weeks after the conflict began, Islamophobia Register Australia recorded a 13-fold increase in incidents compared to the previous year, while the Executive Council of Australian Jewry reported a six-fold increase in anti-Semitic incidents, saying more had occurred following the start of the war than in the entire previous year.

'People should be able to disagree peacefully'

In Victoria, police have established 'Operation Park' to investigate offences associated with the Middle East conflict.

They have investigated 88 incidents relating to anti-Semitism and 16 related to Islamophobia, mostly involving things like graffiti and verbal abuse.

Queensland Police said it did not categorise the offences in a searchable way and flagged "police aren’t always involved" in discriminatory incidents.

NSW Police was not able to access potential data and Western Australia also raised an issue with gathering data but said there had been "no incidents involving violence" in the state.

ACT Police said there had been no incidents there, and South Australia said it had "not observed an increase" in reports of racially motivated incidents. The Northern Territory and Tasmanian police forces did not respond.

The federal government's recently appointed Special Envoy on Social Cohesion, Peter Khalil, said his role would "absolutely" be looking at rises in hate on social media.

His appointment follows the announcement of a special envoy on anti-Semitism, and the promise of one on Islamophobia, although some Muslim leaders have questioned the worth of such an appointment.

Mr Khalil said the appointments were needed to help respond to "the challenges we're facing at the moment" but he hoped "if we do our work effectively, we navigate through what is a difficult period now, those roles won't be necessary in the future".

Mr Khalil said he and the government supported the right to political expression "100 per cent".

"People should be able to disagree peacefully on issues without resorting to the personal attack on someone based on their identity," he said.

Grassroots efforts to combat the impacts

Amid the rise in discrimination, members of affected communities are standing up to support one another.

Heshy Adelist, who owns an outdoor cleaning company, has been voluntarily removing anti-Semitic graffiti in Melbourne.

After being alerted to a spray-painted message to "kill Jews" in November last year, he immediately left the job he was on to go and clean it off.

"We already have so much hate in this world already," he said.

"If it had have said kill all Muslims, or kill or Christians, I would have gone out and cleaned it, it's more about the hate.

"But when it said kill the Jews, since I am Jewish, it was a bit more personal."

He has since cleaned off plenty more hate speech, including Nazi symbols, for free and is part of an informal message group where people can report and respond to anti-Semitism.

Also in Melbourne, Abdurrafi Suwarno has been offering emotional and legal support to victims of Islamophobia, who he said were often women of colour.

"There are many online incidents, there's a lot of Islamophobic graffiti that happens, there is a lot of workplace incidents," he said.

"It's been extremely intense and horrible, it feels for our entire community that we've been going through a collective and unending trauma, and while we're crying for our brothers and sisters overseas, we're also seeing the direct impacts on the ground here."

Mr Suwarno works with the Islamophobia Support Service which is run by the Islamic Council of Victoria, and feels a responsibility to hear the often-untold stories.

"I wouldn't say it feels good, I would say it feels necessary," he said.

Training for police and calls to increase eSafety powers

The Online Hate Prevention Institute and the Belgium-based Online Hate Task Force have used their latest research to run training for police from across the world.

The session was staged in Brussels and online, with contributions from the European Commission Coordinator on combating anti-Muslim hatred, Marion Lalisse, and the Office of the EU Coordinator on combating anti-Semitism and fostering Jewish life.

Dr Andre Oboler said some Australian officers, including some members of the Federal Police, had taken part.

"The biggest piece of feedback was a view that this sort of training really needs to be rolled out to the grass roots," he said.

"The police we had were generally those working on biased hate crimes, or in the counter-terrorism space, but their view was this is really training that the cops on the beat need."

Dr Oboler has spent more than a decade at the Online Hate Prevention Institute and was previously co-chair of the Israeli government's Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism.

He said there was potential for more Australian officers to get access to the training.

"We've already had contact with some of the police forces that are interested — again, one of the difficulties comes back to funding."

The institute's latest report has recommended expanding the remit of Australia's eSafety Commissioner, so it can deal with group-based hate.

"At the moment, it can only deal with hate targeting individuals," Dr Oboler said.

"But if it's attacking the entire community right now, it's out of eSafety's remit, they have no power to deal with that."

The research found the rate offensive posts were removed varied "significantly" between social media platforms, but overall, for anti-Semitism 18 per cent of the offending posts were removed, and 32 per cent of the Islamophobic posts were taken down.

"We need eSafety to be able to take down such content as well," Dr Oboler said.

"They need to be able to issue a notice, and they can't do that unless the government updates the legislation and actually gives them that power."

An eSafety spokesperson said the government had commissioned an independent review of Australia's Online Safety Act and the final report was expected by the end of October.

"We will also continue to work closely with the Australian government to ensure the Online Safety Act and related enabling legislation remains fit for purpose and adequately reflects Australians' needs and expectations," the spokesperson said.