Source : Perth Now news
Young people on social media have been targeted with anti-Semitic memes based on the popular cartoon My Little Pony, likely distributed by an Australian account.
As the royal commission into anti-Semitism turns its attention to the role of big tech in disseminating hatred, one expert said hatred of Jews was often promoted in coded terms online.
In one example, a cartoon depicting a My Little Pony character said it was impossible to bake six million muffins, CyberWell founder and chief executive Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor told the inquiry on Monday.
The comment was a coded way of denying the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust and used the children’s cartoon to spread its message to young people, the anti-Semitism expert said.
“You’re priming them to also see the Holocaust and the story of the Holocaust through the lens of denial,” Ms Cohen Montemayor said.
The US-born resident of Israel established CyberWell in 2022 to track online anti-Semitism.
While most platforms were fairly effective at policing Holocaust denial, other forms of Jew hatred often slipped through the cracks and more was needed to better categorise forms of hate speech online, Ms Cohen Montemayor said.
On Monday, the top lawyer for livestreaming platform Kick was unable to conclusively say whether describing Jews as “evil rats and subhumans” would breach the platform’s guidelines.
“I believe (they would), but I think that’s a difficult one for me to answer,” Tiat Oon Ooi said when asked by Nicholas Bender SC, the counsel for several Jewish community groups.
“I’m not specifically well-acquainted with the details of the moderation guidelines,” he said.
While egregious examples of hate speech like inciting violence would be obvious, identifying other instances could be “more art than science”, Mr Ooi said.
Kick boasts 100 million users and bills itself as an alternative to Amazon-owned Twitch with higher pay rates for streamers and looser content moderation.
Representatives from TikTok and YouTube will front the inquiry on Tuesday.
