Social media has allowed horrific antisemitic attacks on people ranging from schoolchildren to one of Australia’s most prominent families, the antisemitism royal commission has heard.
On Monday, former Westfield co-chief executive Steven Lowy told the inquiry his family had faced more than 15,000 serious online attacks in a single year.
The Lowy Family Group has its own security team to monitor threats.
Of the 15,000 attacks in the 12 months to February, the team identified 200 “persons of interest” and referred “in the order of” 30 or 40 to police.
The commission was shown examples of Steven Lowy, his wife, Judy Lowy, and his father, Frank Lowy, – a Holocaust survivor and billionaire retail mogul – being targeted.
The examples included death threats, calls for Frank Lowy and others to be executed, and antisemitic tropes and memes.
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia emailSteven Lowy warned the online threats could lead to real-world violence.
He said social media platforms should be subject to the same laws as traditional media, where they would be subject to prosecution.
The commission heard from the mother of a 12-year-old girl who said her daughter had been abused, bullied online, and physically threatened by other children, who had drawn a swastika on her desk and subjected her to Nazi salutes.
Another anonymous witness described the abuse his 14-year-old son had experienced on Discord. He described “horrifying” threats and provided an example of what counsel assisting Matt Sherman described as a “reference to fairly grotesque sexual violence”.
Things can “get out of control really quickly” in online chats and group chats, the father said.
Arsen Ostrovsky, the head of the Australia, Israel and Jewish Affairs Council’s Sydney office, was injured in the December Bondi terror attack and a picture he shared of his bloodied head was immediately used to spread conspiracy theories, with images manipulated to claim he was a “crisis actor”.
It was a “relentless tsunami” of hate, he said.
Ostrovsky described “literally being prepped to go into surgery” when he learned about the proliferation of deepfake images and memes about him being generated.
“And there were images, videos and material suggesting everything from that this was a false flag attack … that this wasn’t real blood, that it was ketchup. There were images of me holding a what looked like a Academy Award trophy, and many of these images, videos and material, are still online today,” he said.
Another witness, Israeli-Australian author Lee Kofman, said she had created a WhatsApp group in 2023 for Jewish creatives to have a “safe space” after the 7 October attack on Israel.
A reporter shared some of the contents of that chat to a third party, after which it spread through social media and prompted the federal government to create new anti-doxing laws.
Kofman, who described herself as a left-wing Zionist who supports Palestinian rights and the two-state solution, said the group members were portrayed as a “sinister cabal”, and that she and others lost work.
Over the next two weeks, commissioner Virginia Bell will hear more evidence about “the dissemination of antisemitic content and other forms of hateful speech in the online environment, as well as antisemitism in traditional media and broadcasting”.
The commission heard on Monday that representatives from the ABC and SBS will be called as witnesses to the royal commission into antisemitism and social cohesion, after complaints were made to the inquiry about their coverage of the Middle East.
Counsel assisting Richard Lancaster SC said some submissions to the royal commission – established after the Bondi terror attack – are “highly critical” of the public broadcasters’ reporting on the Middle East conflict.
“There are complaints that the ABC and the SBS have produced coverage that is inaccurate or unbalanced, both in their selection of stories and focus and in the reportage that they produce,” he said.
The special envoy to combat antisemitism, Jillian Segal, will be called to speak on those concerns, he said.
Both the ABC and SBS have made submissions to the inquiry.
The ABC has consistently defended its coverage against what the managing director, Hugh Marks, has called “unfounded” criticism.
The ABC’s chair, Kim Williams, defended the broadcaster over News Corp claims of biased reporting last month.
“Recent commercial media has accused the ABC of bias and as having contributed to the rise of antisemitism. The ABC stands by its reporting of the conflict in the Middle East,” Williams said in a statement to the Sydney Morning Herald.
The SBS has also defended its coverage.
“As a public service media organisation, SBS provides accurate, balanced and impartial coverage across a range of matters, including antisemitism and social cohesion, in accordance with the SBS code of practice and in fulfilment of its charter,” a spokesperson said.
Former Adelaide writers’ week director Louise Adler claimed in Deepcut News on Monday that most of the submissions to the commission would have been “scripted by the [Israel] lobby’s full-time ‘project officers’” and should be rigorously scrutinised.
The commission has previously considered the definition of antisemitism, and whether it is conflated with criticisms of Israel, leading to a chilling effect on such criticisms amid the ongoing killings and humanitarian crisis in Palestine.
Members of the Israel lobby are “the leading proponents of the conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism”, Adler claimed.
“If Bondi teaches us anything, it’s that Jews (but not only Jews) are greatly imperilled when this distinction is obscured.”
Lancaster told the commission that not all social media platforms had responded well to its inquiries.
Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and TikTok had engaged “meaningfully”, he said.
But there was no response from X or Telegram, a limited response from Reddit and Twitch, and that Gab was “openly hostile”, with a representative saying the platform will “publish what it likes, when it likes”.
Lancaster raised the “potential for the online environment to function as an incubator of antisemitic violence”.
“It has become increasingly apparent that the online environment – and social media platforms in particular – are perhaps the most significant vector for the spread of antisemitism and hate in the community,” he said.
A range of academic experts, and representatives from Meta and the Australian Communications and Media Authority will also attend the commission.
