A major Muslim advocacy group has expressed concern that Australia is importing rightwing extremist content from Britain, the US and Europe through social media platforms, and says it has identified what appears to be “inauthentic behaviour” between a network of pages in Australia that links to white supremacist content overseas.
The Australian Muslim Advocacy Network has used a submission to the Senate inquiry into foreign interference through social media to warn that rising extremism undermines security, social cohesion and, ultimately, democracy. The group points out that 12 micro-parties with discriminatory anti-Muslim policies ran at the last federal election – “the largest number of groups that we have recorded”.
“We remain very concerned about the exportation of right wing extremist rhetoric from the UK, Europe and USA to Australia through coordinated exercises on social media platforms like Facebook, and its potentially devastating impacts for Australia’s democracy, social cohesion and national security,” the submission says.
The ABC has reported that rightwing extremists now make up around a third of all domestic investigations by Australia’s spy agency Asio.
The reporting by the ABC’s Background Briefing program in June is partly based on an Asio threat assessment issued to security professionals in May. The document warned that Covid-19-related restrictions were “being exploited by extreme right-wing narratives that paint the state as oppressive, and globalisation and democracy as flawed and failing”.
Mike Burgess, the director general of security, said in a speech in February that “violent Islamic extremism” remained Asio’s principal concern – but it was also focused on small extreme rightwing cells who met regularly in suburbs around Australia to salute Nazi flags, inspect weapons, train in combat and share their hateful ideology.
Earlier this year, the Muslim advocacy network, which was set up after the massacre against Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, working with Birchgrove Legal, a Sydney law firm, asked Facebook to overhaul its moderation policies.
The network says in its submission that unpublished research from Victoria University in 2018 studied more than 41,000 posts in far-right Facebook groups and identified radicalising discourse. Based on the study, the network conducted “an investigation of Facebook’s efficacy in enforcing its own hate policy standards”.
It says it wanted to test whether extremist voices were still active after Christchurch. It says its investigation of the groups it was able to identify “revealed they were still very active” and in the course of this work, “we have identified what appears to be inauthentic behaviour between a network of pages in Australia, that links to right wing extremism and white supremacist content overseas”.
It says Facebook welcomed the investigation “but part of our work is ongoing monitoring to see whether systemic changes are having a translatable impact to make the platform safer, and encourage better moderation by page administrators – [and] so far, we have observed negligible change to [the platform’s] internal escalation capacity”.
The network acknowledges that enforcement is challenging, given organised “hate actors” rely on being able to promulgate misinformation and malicious content “disguised as external news sites or opinion”. But it says the platform lacks a content moderation guide for identifying white supremacist ideology or discourse.
It says research in this field suggests radicalising material is often circulated through malicious “news” platforms to circumvent criminal sanction, and much of the material in circulation “falls short of actually inciting violence, which poses a real difficulty in terms of the application of criminal law”. But it says the government might consider strengthening the existing criminal laws used for harmful online conduct.
The Victoria University research, seen by Guardian Australia, examined posting activity by anti-Islam, racial and cultural superiority groups in Victoria, and examined mobilisation themes and messaging.
The study suggested Victoria’s far right was “becoming an increasingly radical milieu that may aid, even inadvertently, violent outcomes”. It noted there was a degree of radicalisation in the community that manifested in “extreme rhetoric and statements” such as rejecting parliamentary democracy as a legitimate form of government, endorsement of violence and references to white genocide.
The Senate inquiry was established last year to investigate the risks posed to Australia’s democracy by foreign interference through social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and WeChat.
A range of groups have made submissions. The home affairs department used its submission to warn foreign interference activity against Australian interests is occurring at an “unprecedented scale” and flag that measures to help people to identify fake news could be one of the potential responses to defending sovereignty.
Analysts from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute told the inquiry financially motivated actors from Kosovo, Albania and the Republic of North Macedonia used nationalistic and Islamophobic content to target and manipulate Australian Facebook users during the 2019 election, and argued the coronavirus pandemic was an accelerant for misinformation online.
The search engine giant Google has noted the Covid-19 crisis has led to a significant increase in phishing attacks and scams as “bad actors” look to either frighten or motivate unsuspecting recipients of fake material. It highlighted a pandemic-related spike in online activity as “bad actors use Covid-related themes to create urgency so that people respond to phishing attacks and scams”.
