Testimony as a Target: Online Abuse Against Royal Commission Witnesses
A new piece published this month in both The Conversation and Open Forum was written by Josh Roose, our Director of Research & Policy, about the online abuse being directed at witnesses testifying before the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. Josh appeared as an expert witness before the Commission in blocks 5 and 8, in his capacity as Associate Professor at Deakin University's Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation.
Since the Bondi Beach terror attack last December, where 15 people were killed during what researchers describe as the worst year for antisemitic attacks outside Israel in three decades, the Commission has been hearing testimony from witnesses across the country. Josh's piece looks at a troubling pattern emerging alongside those hearings: the online abuse directed at the people giving evidence. It draws directly on the social media monitoring work our research team has been running throughout the Commission, tracking how witnesses are being targeted online in the hours and days after they testify.
The findings are stark. As of the writing of the article, Dor’s team had documented and verified more than 1,300 antisemitic posts from over 1,100 distinct accounts, with abuse extending beyond witnesses themselves to their families, including their children. Five clips from a single media page generated over 4,000 comments, and one witness alone received more than 2,200, many containing violent language. The content spans neo-Nazi imagery, Holocaust denial, and conspiracy theories branding witnesses as "paid Mossad operatives," through to explicit calls for execution and digitally altered images depicting witnesses in gas chambers.
There's also more to understand about how this abuse has been handled so far. Of 150 posts reported to social media platforms after a single hearing, only five were initially removed, and one message reading "JEW KISS ASS KILL ALL JEWS" was assessed twice and found not to breach community standards. More than 1,100 posts referred to the Australian Federal Police have seen little visible follow-up, pointing to an area where responses are still catching up with the scale of what's happening.
The article's conclusion is measured but serious: no witness has yet withdrawn from the Commission, but this kind of coordinated intimidation directly challenges the democratic and legal processes the Commission depends on. It points to specific gaps, including Section 6M of the Royal Commissions Act not being designed with online abuse in mind, and raises a harder, unanswerable question: how many potential witnesses chose not to come forward at all.
It's a piece that reflects exactly the kind of evidence base The Dor Foundation exists to build, and it's well worth reading in full.
Source: Josh Roose, "Testimony as a target," Open Forum, 17 August 2026.
About the author: Josh Roose serves as Director of Research & Policy at The Dor Foundation, where he leads the research agenda that underpins the Foundation's work. Josh is also an Associate Professor at Deakin University's Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation and is one of Australia's foremost experts in extremism, democratic resilience and social cohesion.