Bot fears over hate wave

A wave of Holocaust denial and antisemitic abuse on social media that followed the announcement of new school lessons on the Holocaust may be a foreign information warfare attack, an online hate expert has warned.

Online Hate Prevention Institute (OHPI) chief executive Dr Andre Oboler said the comments came from accounts that were “locked and typically have under 50 friends, some only have single digit friends”.

“My analysis is that Australia is under an information warfare attack. Likely from Iran,” he wrote on Facebook.

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare announced the changes last week after state and federal education ministers endorsed them.

Drawn up by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), they add lessons on Australia’s Jewish history and the Holocaust from 2027.

“Kids aren’t born racist, they aren’t born hating anybody, it’s something that’s learnt, that’s taught,” Clare said.

Oboler told The AJN that comments on a range of posts, including some by mainstream media organisations, were “out of control”, with some openly expressing Holocaust denial.

“Many were repeating a brand of Holocaust distortion that comes out of Russia and Eastern Europe during the Cold War, but the profiles of those sharing it don’t show any connection to that background. It has the look of compromised accounts being run by bots,” he said.

“Other accounts are locked and have very few friends. It looks like they have been created to troll.”

He said real accounts were also in the mix, belonging to people “buying into the argument that addressing antisemitism is giving Jews ‘special treatment'”. He said those claims were tied to conspiracy theories about Jewish power.

An AJN analysis of comments on its own Facebook post about the announcement found 42 opposed the changes and 12 supported them. Many of those opposed to the reforms used openly racist language, and some were too vile to reprint.

A large number of the comments using antisemitic tropes came from accounts that were locked or had fewer than 50 friends.

That does not prove the accounts are fake. Many Facebook users lock their profiles, and an account with few friends can belong to a real person who does not want to be identified. But it is consistent with the pattern Oboler described.

Some social media accounts appear to be particular hubs of antisemitic tropes, such as an X account called Anglo Alliance which complains that students “already have to visit the holocaust museum and other b******t. Gen Z and Gen Alpha has them worried. Stand strong lads.”

Replies to that included a complaint that “the group worth 1% of the population” could force “re-education on kids”, and a claim that antisemitism could not exist because “Semites don’t exist”.

ASIO director-general Mike Burgess has warned that foreign states use social media to inflame division. In his Lowy Lecture in November 2025, he said Russian operatives were “covertly stoking and amplifying division here” and spreading “vitriolic, polarising commentary”.

“These state-sanctioned trolls are more than propaganda puppets; they want to turn hot-button issues into burning issues,” he said.

ASIO assessed in August 2025 that Iran directed at least two arson attacks on Jewish targets, at Lewis’ Continental Kitchen in Sydney and the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne. The government expelled Iran’s ambassador. Burgess described the attacks as part of a global effort to “fan the flames of division”.

ASIO has not said a foreign state is behind the curriculum comments.

If Oboler is right, the volume of hate online may overstate how many Australians share these views.

The Scanlon Foundation Research Institute’s 2025 Mapping Social Cohesion survey found 15 per cent of Australians held negative views of Jewish people. That is a minority, though up from 9 per cent in 2023.

Oboler said he believed the aim was “simply to weaken social cohesion in Australia. For Iran it is also a projection of power.”