A Pakistani man living in Australia has spoken of his “deep trauma” and said his life had become a “nightmare” after his photo was widely circulated on social media falsely labelling him as one of the shooters in the Bondi beach terror attack.
Naveed Akram, 30, a who runs his own business in New South Wales, found himself at the centre of a storm of misinformation that began to spread following the deadly shooting on Sydney’s Bondi beach that left 16 people dead.
Police on Monday identified the two alleged shooters as father and son Sajid Akram, 50, and Naveed Akram, 24.
As information spread online that one of the shooters was a Pakistani man who shared the same name, Akram’s photos began to be shared widely on platforms such as X and Facebook, labelling him as a culprit, without any verification.
Incorrect information, giving Akram’s education background as that of the shooter’s, was also published on mainstream media websites such as the Jerusalem Post and World Is One news.
Akram described his “shock and horror” when he saw that his photo was being shared by accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers and was trending on X.
“It was extremely disturbing for me,” said Akram. “As soon as I saw that my photo was being shared as the shooter, I came home instantly as I knew it was very dangerous. I was so traumatised and I knew I needed to try and get the message out that this wasn’t me.”
Many of the accounts that were sharing his image falsely were from India, as right-wing influencers seized on the alleged origin of the shooter as proof of Pakistan’s terror connections, without fact-checking whether it was the correct man they were vilifying.
The alleged attacker Naveed Akram is an Australian citizen. His father migrated to Australia in the late 1990s and is not an Australian citizen, but the Australian authorities revealed his nationality.
None of the Facebook or X posts that wrongly showed Akram’s image were given warning labels or community notes by the platform’s factcheckers to flag it as misinformation.
“This shooting was such a terrible, terrible tragedy, I really have no words,” said Akram. “So it’s really shocked and disturbed me that people would put my life in danger with these fake posts.”
Akram said he had gone to the police to report the misinformation but they had just told him to disable all his social media accounts. He said he was also unable to reach X to get their assistance. Instead he resorted to making his own video which he posted to Facebook and Twitter, in a bid to clarify that he had been wrongly identified and called for the posts with his photograph to be reported and taken down.
He called on the social media platform to take responsibility for giving a platform to misinformation. “Lots of these fake posts are still up on social media. I’m still scared to go outside even to do the shopping,” he said. “My life could still be at risk because of this. My only priority right now is clear my name and protect me and my wife.”
Akram was not alone in being caught up in false and malicious reports that spread across social media after the shooting. One X post with more than 8m views incorrectly claimed the shooter was an IDF soldier, while another claimed the shooter was a Lebanese man of Palestinian descent.
Meanwhile, the man who tackled one of the shooters and took his gun from him has been confirmed as 43-year-old father-of-two, Ahmed al-Ahmed. But on X users falsely claimed the hero was actually a 47-year-old IT worker, with a British name.
The posts linked to a website called “thedailyaus.world”, which was registered on Sunday in Iceland to a registration company, according to WHOIS records, so it is unclear who operates the site.
This misinformation was repeated by X’s AI chatbot, Grok, which responded to users falsely claiming the wrong man “heroically tackled and disarmed a gunman during a terrorist attack at Bondi Beach, getting shot twice but preventing more deaths”.
Timothy Graham, an associate professor at Queensland University of Technology, said the fact the Grok post had not had a community note applied to it in the 10 hours after it was posted showed how X’s fact-checking system failed on deeply-divided content during such an event.
On some posts identifying al-Ahmed, users submitted community notes claiming another man was the perpetrator and linking to the site in Iceland, but those notes were not published on any posts seen by Guardian Australia.
Some accounts did correctly name al-Ahmed, but they incorrectly claimed he was a Maronite Christian, when he is Syrian Muslim.
There were also false claims that Muslims had set off fireworks in Bankstown in western Sydney in celebration of the attack. The fireworks were in nearby Padstow and were part of a Christmas carols event.
Contributing to the pile-on, one user labelled the Bonnyrigg home address of the alleged shooter as a mosque on Google Maps. The label has since been removed.
Google and X were approached for comment.
Additional reporting by Nino Bucci.
