Calls for violence against Jews surged on social media after the Bondi Beach terror attack, the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has been told.
Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, founder and executive director of CyberWell, said the global not-for-profit had detected a wave of posts praising, justifying or calling for further violence against Jews after the massacre.
Appearing by video link on Monday, Montemayor said CyberWell had already established a specific Australian arm before the December attack, in which two gunmen killed 15 people and injured 40 during a Chanukah celebration attended by about 1000 people.
She said CyberWell’s monitoring had found both long-running antisemitic tropes and event-driven narratives that spiked after major incidents, including the Bondi attack and last year’s federal election.
The most alarming material, she said, involved calls for violence, justification of violence and demands for more attacks on Jews.
“This is a form of antisemitism that we have seen reach double digits in our own data and our own monitoring following the October 7 attacks,” she said.
“Similarly, after the Bondi Beach terror attack, we saw a wave and influx of justifying and calling for more violence against the Jewish community.”
CyberWell is an independent organisation that tracks and reports online antisemitism using open-source intelligence, machine learning and multilingual monitoring across major platforms.
Montemayor told the commission CyberWell is a “trusted partner” of Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, giving it access to escalation channels for reporting antisemitic content.
Elon Musk’s X does not work with CyberWell, she said.
The inquiry heard there were sharp differences between platforms in how often they removed material after it was reported by CyberWell.
Montemayor said TikTok had the highest takedown rate for “violative content” reported by the organisation, removing 88.8 per cent of flagged material.
Across the platforms CyberWell works with, the average removal rate was 52.4 per cent.
Her evidence came during the commission’s Sydney hearing block, which is examining online hate and traditional media.
The commission has previously heard from other online hate experts that antisemitism surged after the October 7 Hamas attacks and again after violent incidents targeting Jewish communities.
The Online Hate Prevention Institute (OHPI) had previously told the inquiry its monitoring found online antisemitism used both old and emerging forms, including blood libels, dehumanising language, conspiracy theories about Jewish control, and posts using “Zionist” as a coded substitute for Jews.
Its evidence pointed to large differences between platforms in the removal of reported hate, with some sites acting on most reports and others leaving the majority of flagged content online.
Montemayor’s evidence adds to that picture, showing how quickly online antisemitism can shift from abuse and conspiracy theories to explicit support for violence after real-world attacks.
For Jewish Australians, she said, the issue is not abstract moderation policy but real-world safety.
Her evidence was that online antisemitism after Bondi did not stop at denial or abuse. It included praise for the attack, blame directed at Jews as a group and calls for further violence.