News

How online hate works

Australian Catholic University-led research has revealed the shocking proliferation and self-structuring of both antisemitic and Islamophobic online hate in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks on Israel.

Key points:

• Researchers have explored online antisemitic and Islamophobic hate networks and their growth following the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks on Israel.
• Users participating in the online hate ecosystem grew 5.4 times between 2022 and 2025.
• Active users became six times more toxic after the October 7 event.

What was previously a sparse and somewhat peripheral hate ecosystem in Australia, proliferated into a post-attack super cell of toxic online communities gravitating around a small number of influencers, according to the report’s principal investigator Dr Andrea Giovannetti.

Using a super dataset made of 1.5 million interactions on X and about 57,000 Tumblr posts generated by more than 50k accounts from 2022 to 2025, the research team tracked the transformative effect of the October 7 attacks on the Australian online ecosystem.

“Unfortunately, not only did the ecosystem grow 5.4 times in terms of users participating in it, when we disaggregated influence flows across communities, we found that its structure became much more sophisticated,” Dr Giovannetti said.

“What was once a relatively small number of prolific commentators, expanded into something more complex and articulated.” 

Users that were active before the October 7 event became six times more toxic in their interactions. At the same time the top 20 hateful opinion leaders more than doubled their share of hateful influence across the whole network, moving from an influence share of less than one per cent of the network in 2022 to five per cent in 2025, despite posting less frequently.

“Considering the expansion of the network in between the two years, it is easy to see why tracking raising stars may be useful to pre-empt and de-escalate future hate,” Dr Giovannetti said.

The investigation was an initiative of the Tackling Hate Laboratory and a joint work with Deakin University Associate Professor Matteo Vergani, and was fully funded by the Department of Home Affairs under the National Research Project on Countering Violent Extremism.

The project has cast new light on escalation dynamics and extremism in Australia at a time when alarming social division is being exposed through the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

“This report shows how a single geopolitical event can generate a deep social cleavage that reflects on online dynamics, and probably, also on offline behaviours,” Dr Giovanetti said.

Dr Andrea Giovanetti is based in Sydney, Australia, and available for interview via phone or Zoom.

Media Contact: Damien Stannard, 0484 387349, damien.stannard@acu.edu.au