Social media giant Meta has refused to take action against people who post racist and abusive material online, which Aboriginal leaders say is rife as the No campaign against the Voice to parliament has mobilised.
The First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria first complained to Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, in March, after an escalation of social media abuse.
Meta faces criticism over allowing racist social media posts.Credit: Artwork: Jamie Brown
The assembly, which is the democratically elected representative body of First Nations people in Victoria, met the social network company and established direct contact with a Meta representative.
The assembly then reported “many more” racist and hateful comments over the following months, but posts featuring racial slurs and stereotypes including “feral Abos” and “black k@*ts” were deemed not to have breached Facebook’s community standards, and no action was taken.
A picture comment featuring an Aboriginal man and the words “my land, liquorland” was also reported to Meta and found not to have breached Facebook’s rules. Another post featuring obscene language and urging those behind the assembly page to join their “brothers” in prison was also found to not breach rules.
Assembly co-chair Rueben Berg said its Facebook posts were now targeted in hundreds of comments a week that contained racist abuse and hatred.
“The No case is really emboldening the trolls and bigots. Our assembly Facebook page went from getting a handful of racist comments a week to our staff having to report and block hundreds of people every week,” Berg told this masthead on Wednesday.
Berg, a Gunditjmara man, urged Meta to “take seriously the pain and hurt that First Nations people are exposed to on Facebook on a daily basis” by removing racist comments and banning people spreading abuse.
“They have a multiple warning policy, which is wild. If someone at a forum got up and started hurling racist abuse at me, they’d be shown the door. But on Facebook, they can just spew horrific racism at us all day, every day,” Berg said.
“Meta has known the referendum [on the Voice to parliament] is coming since the federal election last May. It’s not good enough that they continue to allow racism and hatred to fester.”
A Meta spokesperson said the company was mindful of the impact of the Voice debate on Indigenous communities and pointed to support measures the company had rolled out, including a mental health campaign in partnership with e-mental health support service ReachOut that focused on the social and emotional wellbeing of young and First Nations people.
The spokesperson said additional support measures would be made available to users “before, during and after the Voice referendum”.
Nyunggai Warren Mundine’s social media post.
Despite the complaints from the assembly and other Indigenous leaders, the spokesperson said Meta had worked with First Nations organisations and other partners to remove racist and abusive content.
“No one should have to experience racist abuse anywhere,” they said.
The concerns about Facebook come as the No campaign has been criticised over public commentary from some of its leading figures and supporters.
Last week, No campaign leader Nyunggai Warren Mundine approvingly shared an image on professional networking site, LinkedIn, showing a gun pointed at a person’s head and the words, “VOTE YES OR ELSE!!” in a speech bubble. The sleeve of the holder of the gun was adorned with a Soviet red and yellow hammer and sickle beside an Aboriginal flag.
Mundine shared the image with an accompanying comment saying: “100% right”. Mundine did not respond to questions about the post.
A LinkedIn spokesperson did not answer questions about the post, but said the company removed any content that violated their policies.
“Our policies outline that any false or misleading content is not allowed on LinkedIn, and we use technology, teams of reviewers and third-party fact-checkers to ensure content is in line with these policies,” they said in a statement.
“Also, hate speech does not belong on LinkedIn. We’re committed to setting a high standard for respectful conversations on our platform.”
Voice co-architect Marcia Langton accused the No camp of “supercharging racism”.
“We’ve seen this in calls for genocide now being made by the ugly, bottom-of-the-swamp racists flooding cyberspace with their crazy theories about the white race being under threat,” she said.
“Meanwhile, Aboriginal people in remote areas face an existential threat - more death, more misery, more poverty and more exclusion - because governments will not listen to Aboriginal people. No one is giving thought to the much worse situation we as Indigenous people will face if the No case wins.“
On Wednesday, Indigenous journalist Stan Grant told ABC radio that social media had poisoned public discourse and urged journalists to seek out expert opinion on issues.
“It should not be foregrounded in what we do, it has been an awful, awful cancer in so many ways on our relations to one another,” he said.
The Uluru Dialogue on Monday released a statement condemning misinformation and racist jokes from the No campaign. The group is the collective of architects and authors of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, co-chaired by Voice co-designers Pat Anderson and Megan Davis.
Responding to speeches and remarks made during the Warren Mundine-chaired Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Sydney over the weekend, the dialogue group condemned a performance by comedian Rodney Marks that, it said, portrayed Indigenous Australians as “rent-seekers”, “violent” and “women bashers”.
“The fact that leaders of the No campaign and the keynote speakers at the CPAC conference, including Mundine, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Tony Abbott, turn a blind eye to it, is tragic, particularly for our young people.”
Mundine did not respond to questions about the performance, or a speech made afterwards by Gary Johns, president of the No campaign group Recognise a Better Way.
In his speech Johns claimed to quote David Price, the non-indigenous father of the shadow spokesperson for Indigenous Australians, Senator Price, saying: “If you want a voice, learn English. That’s your voice.”
Nationals Party leader David Littleproud on Tuesday rebuked the views expressed in Johns’ CPAC speech, saying they would not be welcome in the National Party. Liberals for Yes group commended Littleproud’s statement and said he was “one hundred percent correct”.
“Gary Johns’ deeply disturbing views have no place in any major political organisation, and that includes the official No campaign in this important referendum. If the views expressed are not good enough for the National Party, then they are not good enough for the No campaign either,” the organisation said in a written statement.
Mundine dismissed two potential volunteers from the Fair Australia campaign earlier this month after he said they had expressed racist remarks.
Mundine has also separately rebuked Advance advisory board member David Adler for his comments suggesting Grant artificially darkened his skin and questioning Victorian senator Lidia Thorpe’s Aboriginal heritage. Advance is the No vote group that financially backs Fair Australia.
Last week, in an interview with this masthead, the Central Land Council’s general manager of professional services, Josie Douglas, called attention to “the cloud of misinformation” that she said was being created by the No campaign to “mischievously sow confusion” ahead of the referendum date.
Douglas’ comments were echoed by Megan Davis on ABC radio on Friday, when the Voice co-designer was asked to address a letter distributed by Fair Australia to its supporters, which asserted there was more to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
The letter, authored in Nampijinpa Price’s name, said a secret government document revealed covert plans behind the May 2017 statement. These plans, it said, included changing the national flag and reparation payments for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
“We are hearing a lot of confusion, and a lot of people going from Yes to soft Yes and undecided, because of the misinformation and disinformation that is passively promoted by a lot of mainstream media, and so people don’t know what is up and what is down,” Davis said.
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