What three million online posts reveal about anti-First Nations hate in Australia

A federal parliamentary inquiry is currently asking a difficult question: what is driving racism, hate and violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and what role does the internet play?

The inquiry follows several violent incidents, including the attack on Camp Sovereignty in Melbourne in August 2025 (and importantly, a new attack on August 2 2026), and the alleged attempted bombing of an Invasion Day rally in Perth.

At public hearings around the country, First Nations people and organisations have described racism in workplaces, schools, public institutions and online. They have also warned racist abuse is becoming more open, more organised and easier to spread.

New research helps explain the patterns behind those experiences. By understanding how this online hate works, we can better stop it.

The research

Researchers at the Tackling Hate Lab analysed more than three million posts and news items about the 2023 Voice referendum, Anzac Day 2025 (when a group of men were charged for heckling during a Welcome to Country) and the so-called March for Australia rallies in 2025. The data came from X, news media, Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, forums and other online platforms.

The study used captured hateful language using Google’s Perspective API, an artificial intelligence (AI) model.

We also used a bespoke AI model trained using judgements from First Nations community annotators to identify anti-First Nations hate. This matters because deciding what counts as racism cannot be separated from the experiences of the people being targeted.

Hate changes with the conversation

Political events reshape how hate targeting First Nations is expressed. Public debates and media moments make it louder and change the dominating narratives.

During the Voice campaign, anti-First Nations hate increased in stages. At the beginning of 2023, the study system detected between 200 and 400 hateful posts on most days.

By September, daily numbers were regularly above 2,000. In early October, immediately before the referendum, they reached about 3,600 posts per day.

The pattern looked less like a single explosion and more like a staircase. Each major campaign moment (such as the launch of campaign advertising, for example) increased hostility.

This suggests political campaigns don’t just reflect existing prejudice. They can create moments when hostile ideas become easier to express, repeat and share.

First Nations public figures received much higher levels of racialised abuse than many non-Indigenous public figures with comparable followings on social media. More than a quarter of all posts mentioning then-Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney in the dataset were classified as racial identity hate. Lidia Thorpe, Noel Pearson and Adam Briggs were also targeted at high rates.

Racism doesn’t always look like a slur

A second finding is that anti-First Nations hate changes form depending on the context.

During the Voice campaign, almost 89% of the hate detected focused on the referendum itself.

Importantly, the study did not classify all opposition to the Voice as hate. Statements such as “Vote No”, or First Nations critiques of the referendum, were not coded as hateful.

Instead, First Nations community annotators identified as hateful language that which portrayed the Voice as a form of racial oppression of non-Indigenous people, or denied the historical and ongoing effects of colonisation and racism.

In these cases, the concern was not disagreement with a policy proposal, but language that community members considered to be hateful because it denied First Nations’ experiences or framed their recognition as a threat to other Australians.

In 2025, the language changed.

Around Anzac Day and the March for Australia, more than 96% of the hate detected directly targeted First Nations identity. White supremacist claims (that is, posts implying or explicitly asserting the superiority of White, settler or European Australians) and dehumanising language made up almost 90% of the total hateful posts.

Around March for Australia alone, white supremacy accounted for 69% of detected hate.

What people report experiencing

The large-scale patterns in the Tackling Hate Lab’s data align with the experiences recorded by Call It Out, an Indigenous-controlled national platform for reporting racism against First Nations people.

Analysis of the roughly 500 reports made to Call It Out each year identifies significant levels of race-based abuse and aggression in online settings (consistently around one in five reports).

Stereotypes that depict First Nations peoples as criminals, dependent on welfare and/or drugs and alcohol, not “Black” enough, or privileged recipients of “government handouts” are also rife online. So is the denigration of culture and denial of contemporary and historical experiences of racism.

The Call It Out data identify online racism as shifting in form and size depending on what’s happening in media, political and other contexts.

The Voice campaign, for instance, brought racism many First Nations people experience daily to the fore. In 2023–24, nearly one in five reports (28%) overall referenced the Voice campaign. Of these, they most commonly called out stereotyping (26%) and hate speech, verbal abuse and bullying (34%, combined), and 57% (combined) occurred on social media or in the media.

The First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, for instance, reported going from blocking two to 50 people a day for racism due to public debate about the Voice.

Importantly, Call it Out data identifies online racism as undermining First Nations wellbeing and their sense of safety, spilling into life offline as physical and verbal attacks in public spaces and as property damage, including following racial profiling of young Aboriginal people on social media.

Forthcoming Call It Out analysis will identify it as both feeding and being fed by far-right groups, who build and coordinate public displays of racism, such as the Anzac Day booing, through social media.

Acting early

The findings show something important: online hate follows recognisable patterns. It builds around political campaigns, public controversies and events connected with national identity.

Misinformation can expand its reach, increase fear and reinforce stereotypes. Public figures and community organisations can then become concentrated targets.

But these high-risk periods can often be anticipated. Online platforms can prepare stronger moderation before major events.

As a first step, Call It Out has recommended to the parliamentary inquiry stronger laws and compliance requirements should be imposed on social media platforms given current poor responses.

Governments can monitor emerging threats and respond before hostility becomes normal by combining measures that reduce the spread of harmful narratives with proactive interventions, such as inoculation strategies.

Racism does not suddenly appear. It builds through repeated stories about who belongs, who deserves support and whose experiences count.

The parliamentary inquiry now has an opportunity to move from recognising the problem to acting on the evidence. Understanding how hate grows is one step towards stopping it becoming part of everyday Australian life.

Matteo Vergani receives funding from the Australian government (Australian Research Council, Department of Home Affairs) and the Canadian government (Public Safety Canada).

Fiona Allison is a co-lead on Call It Out, the first register through which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia are able to report racism.