Content platforms grilled over online antisemitism

A glaring example of how antisemitic content can find its way past a welter of platform self-regulation and remain online came to light at this week’s sitting of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

The RC is now in its second week of Hearing Block 3, the media phase of the inquiry.

A video posted to YouTube after the Bondi Beach massacre remains online on YouTube today. In it, four males speculate that Arsen Ostrovsky, a senior official at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council who sustained severe head injuries in the shooting attack, was “an intelligence asset”, “has a degree in theatre”, behaved “very crisis actor-ish” and used faked blood, and that it’s “false flag after false flag after false flag” and “Zionists do this kind of s**t all the time”.

That this video survives online placed a sobering boundary around claims by a top Australian YouTube executive that the platform’s removal rates of violative material have increased significantly in accordance with its own Community Guidelines.

It was a sit-up moment at the RC on Tuesday afternoon. Trying to explain YouTube’s decision on the Bondi video – and to counter the description of the video by Richard Lancaster SC, counsel assisting, as “a clear breach” of YouTube’s guidelines – Rachel Lord, the platform’s senior manager, government affairs & public policy, Australia/New Zealand, went on the defensive.

“What I have been told from the teams that have reviewed the video is that it is non-violative,” she insisted. She said YouTube’s policy is to remove videos that deny a violent attack took place or that people were harmed in it, but not videos that questioned motivations around it.

Lancaster countered: “I appreciate this isn’t your decision to make or unmake, Ms Lord, so don’t take this as a personal criticism, but I took you to the hate speech policy, which said in terms ‘we don’t allow content that promotes hatred on the basis of, among other things, being a victim of a major violent event’. So could it seriously be considered in your view that this does not violate that policy?” Lord then repeated YouTube’s regulations.