Platforms can’t measure antisemitism

The world’s largest social media platforms faced sustained scrutiny at the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion this week, with representatives from Meta, TikTok, YouTube and livestreaming platform Kick confronted with evidence of significant gaps in moderating and removing antisemitic content.

Across two days of hearings in Sydney on July 6 and 7, Commissioner Virginia Bell heard a consistent picture. Platforms publicly commit to combating hate speech but in practice leave users and community organisations to flag harmful material, with inconsistent enforcement and limited data on the scale of the problem. None of the major platforms could tell the commission from their own data whether antisemitism on their services was increasing or decreasing.

Earlier in the hearing block, the commission heard that antisemitic content across social media had increased approximately fivefold since November 2023, with calls to violence spiking after the Bondi Beach attack.

Meta global director of core policy Benjamin Good, appearing voluntarily via video link from the United States, told the commission the company does not maintain a standalone antisemitism policy and does not track hateful conduct by the group it targets.

Action on hateful conduct on Facebook fell about 79 per cent after changes announced by chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in January 2025 shifted enforcement from proactive automated detection to a reactive model reliant on user reports, with a comparable 73 per cent fall on Instagram. Good accepted Meta already has the AI tools to detect antisemitic content at scale, but said the company wanted to deploy them “responsibly”.