Royal Commission Discovers Extremists using ‘codes’, emojis and more to evade social media detection

Extremists are using coded language and memes to evade detection when posting antisemitic content on social media, a royal commission has heard. Far-right individuals have also adopted memes as a way to push “more palatable” antisemitism, which is less likely to be picked up by moderators.

“We see that extremists use different codes, for example they’ll change a letter in a word to a number to avoid content moderation,” Hannah Rose, an extremism researcher from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue testified. “They’ll use emojis, they’ll use memes, so a lot of inferred … antisemitism.”

Ms Rose also told the commission that the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas let “antisemitism out of the box”, with a 51-fold increase in the volume of antisemitic content on those videos.

Earlier on Wednesday, an online hate prevention charity partially blamed trillionaire Elon Musk for anti-Jewish hatred on social media platform X, remarking that it has deleted far less antisemitic content than other social media platforms. The platform has not responded to repeated requests to engage with the royal commission.