Australia’s royal commission investigating the role of online hate and extremist content in the 2024 Bondi Junction Chanukah terrorist attack that left 15 people dead has hit a wall with major social media platforms, particularly Elon Musk-owned X, which has declined to participate in the inquiry despite its loud self-branding as a global champion of unconstrained free speech.
Musk acquired the platform, then known as Twitter, for $44 billion in 2022, and has since enacted sweeping changes aligned with his free speech agenda: he reinstated hundreds of accounts banned for violating hate speech policies, cut nearly the entire online safety and content moderation staff, rejected the company’s responsibility to shield minors from violent and pornographic content, and publicly argued that both footage of the Bondi attack and offensive Holocaust-themed jokes should remain accessible to users on the platform.
During a blistering 15-minute address to the commission on Friday, lead barrister Richard Lancaster called out X for its deliberate lack of transparency around its role in enabling the spread of terrorist, violent extremist, and virulently anti-Semitic content that puts Australian communities at risk. Lancaster highlighted the stark double standard at the heart of X’s actions: the platform actively participates in Australian regulatory and legal processes to advance its commercial interests and earns significant advertising revenue from Australian users, yet refuses to engage with an inquiry focused on improving online safety for the Australian public.
“X decides to be active in Australia to fight for content to be available on X that would, if published, cause immense sadness and harm to the Australian Jewish community; yet the same company refuses to engage with an Australian royal commission that is inquiring into ways to make social media a better place for Australian end users,” Lancaster told the commission.
Lancaster also condemned X for its use of pages of historical Holocaust imagery in a regulatory submission arguing that footage of Bondi attack victims should remain accessible on the platform. “It was extraordinary of X to deploy those images in my submission. They give no support to a contention that a video made in 2025 showing some of the deceased after the Bondi Chanukah attack should be permitted to be shown online, and the use of Holocaust imagery in that context should be unequivocally condemned,” he added. As of the commission’s proceedings, X has not issued any public response to the criticism, continuing its silence despite its insistence on defending open speech.
The inquiry has also heard harrowing testimony from Arsen Ostrovsky, a survivor of the Bondi attack who was targeted by a widespread online smear campaign that spread deepfake fake images labeling him a “crisis actor” faking the attack. Ostrovsky described living through a “relentless tsunami of Jew hatred online” after the attack, and told the commission he filed formal content complaints with three major platforms: X, YouTube, and Meta Platforms (owner of Facebook and Instagram). While Meta moved quickly to remove the manipulated deepfake content from its platforms, both X and YouTube only confirmed receipt of the complaint and took no further action to remove the harmful material.
Earlier this week, a senior YouTube executive defended the platform’s decision to leave up a video pushing the smear against Ostrovsky, in which four creators falsely claimed he was a paid propaganda asset for Israel. Rachel Lord, senior manager for YouTube Australia, told the commission the video was thoroughly reviewed at senior leadership levels and was deemed to violate no content policies, as it was classified as “non-violent” despite its harmful and misleading accusations.
Meta, another major platform under scrutiny at the inquiry, also faced criticism for its lax content policies that allow a wide range of dehumanizing and hate speech to remain on its platforms Instagram, Facebook, and Threads. In a written submission to the commission, Meta argued that it is not the company’s role “to police offensiveness,” drawing a line between offensive speech and content that causes direct offline harm. As a result, a wide range of explicitly harmful sentiments are permitted on Meta’s platforms: the commission heard that statements including “White people are all Nazis”, “Immigrants are scum”, “Black people are more violent than whites”, “trans people don’t exist”, and “gay people are sinners” are all classified as non-violating and allowed to stay up. Meta also claimed it had already censored “too much content” in recent years, justifying its loosened policies.
Beyond social media platforms, the week’s proceedings also put Australia’s two national public broadcasters, ABC and SBS, under the microscope for their coverage of the ongoing Middle East conflict. Jillian Segal, Australia’s anti-Semitism envoy, told the commission that many Australian Jewish communities feel the broadcasters’ coverage of the Israel-Gaza war lacks balance. She argued that poor and unbalanced coverage has exacerbated the spread of anti-Semitism across Australia by conflating Jewish identity with the actions of the Israeli state. Segal called for the creation of an independent external oversight body to monitor the editorial standards of both broadcasters, arguing that the current in-house ombudsman system lets outlets “mark their own homework” without sufficient independent accountability. Both ABC and SBS have pushed back on the criticism, noting their existing independent complaint processes that handle thousands of content complaints annually and publish public reports on their decisions.