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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/ng-interactive/2026/mar/06/indigenous-australians-racist-social-media-messages-ntwnfb>
"Natasha Wanganeen is unafraid to speak about the struggles and concerns of her
community. But the once rare racist comments on her social media posts have
gone from a trickle to a torrent. “Disgusting abuse,” she says, has become a
daily reality.
“I got a voice message saying he was gonna rape me … and if my ancestors come
back, he’ll kill them again,” the Kaurna, Narungga and Ngarrindjeri woman told
Guardian Australia.
The voice memo landed in her Facebook messenger inbox in 2020. In the message,
heard by
Guardian Australia, a man threatens her with sexual assault, while
calling her a “fucking filthy abo whore”, and says that Australia was “white
people’s land now”.
The messages keep coming. In the past six months she’s been called a “black
cunt” and a “cancer on society”.
Wanganeen’s experience is at the extreme end, but a number of high-profile
Indigenous Australians told
Guardian Australia the same thing: the online
abuse they receive is frequent and getting worse. Many noted a marked uptick in
violent rhetoric since the failed voice to parliament referendum in 2023.
Evidence of this uptick has been collected by the Jumbunna Institute at the
University of Technology Sydney. It established the
Call It Out register in
2022 to allow members of the public to submit reports of racist incidents
towards First Nations people.
It consistently receives about 500 reports a year, a mix of first-hand and
witness accounts. Dr Fiona Allison, associate professor at the Jumbunna
Institute, says online hate can have “real world implications”.
“There’s so much in the report that comes through about some pretty hideous
online threats of violence, including [threatening] the killing of young people
who are seen to be offenders,” she says.
“People are reporting incidents involving sightings of KKK symbols, there’s
references to KKK ideology and to lynchings [of First Nations people] online.”
The messages are so frequent that those experiencing the deluge say it’s
difficult to distinguish between a threat that may be acted upon and those just
spewing hate."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
