Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has been accused of seeing “racism is profitable” and using toxic algorithms to amplify hatred to get “eyeballs” on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
The tech giant was questioned on Tuesday about how it tackles racism by an Australian parliamentary inquiry, which launched after a failed attempt to bomb a Perth “Invasion Day” rally in January.
Meta officials appeared just minutes after the Australian Human Rights Commission who had accused online platforms of allowing hatred and division to spread to boost their bottom-line.
Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner Giridharan Sivaraman was scathing in his assessment of the apps — insisting they had inadequate reporting pathways, delayed action, biased algorithms and AI chatbots, and hollow fact-checking.
“Racism is profitable. It’s profitable for Meta, it’s profitable for others. It gets eyeballs onto their platforms. It means people don’t get challenged,” Mr Sivaraman told the Senators.
“In fact, from what we’ve seen, they’re enabling that by getting rid of fact-checkers.
“By getting rid of accountability measures by making the capacity to report really difficult and responses really slow.”
Despite boosting funding for its fact-checking team ahead of Australia’s 2023 Voice referendum, Meta still struggled to answer questions about basic content moderation across its platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp.
Facebook director of policy for Australia and New Zealand Mia Garlick told the inquiry that while there weren’t content moderators based in Australia, “some” were Australian but couldn’t confirm if any were Indigenous.
She also couldn’t list the First Nations groups or individuals who had been consulted by Meta when establishing its policies, guidance and definitions.
She said five months before the referendum, Meta had undertaken a string of measures as it claimed to “recognise our responsibility during significant civic moments”.
“In the lead up to the 2023 voice referendum, we took a similar approach to content integrity as we do for a federal election,” she said.
It included expanding the company’s “Australian slur list”, establishing a “cross-functional group”, creating specific policy for content reviewers, strengthening coordination with the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Electoral Commission, and giving a funding boost to third-party fact-checkers.
Ms Garlick also said at the time, Meta had identified or been alerted to a “significant amount of violating content” which it removed from platforms.
She said Meta’s latest transparency report published in late 2025 had disclosed that 1.3 million pieces of content on Facebook and 1.3 million on Instagram had been removed for violating its hateful conduct policy.
“We acknowledge, however, that these numbers reflect a global scale and may not always match the experience of different communities every day,” she clarified.
“It’s really important to understand from our perspective, we’re trying to provide services that people find valuable and that they want to use.
“And also we’re trying to provide to businesses that want to advertise on our services. Neither either of those, two groups of people want to experience harmful content on our services.
“Over the history of our platform, we’ve had advertisers and undertake boycotts because of concerns around hate speech. So it’s absolutely not in our business interest to be promoting or providing a service, where people are experiencing harmful content.”
More than two thousand peaceful protesters had been evacuated from Perth’s Forrest Place on January 26 after a then 31-year-old man, Liam Alexander Hall, allegedly threw an explosive device at a crowd of Indigenous people, families and supporters.
The man allegedly behind the attack had been accused of accessing “pro-white” material online and attracted the State’s first terrorist attack charge in WA’s history.
Harm online was raised throughout hearings and in written submissions to the inquiry.
The reach online platforms gave perpetrators to perpetuate their harmful content and language was a key concern raised in a submission by the WA Commissioner for Children and Young People.
“Online platforms have amplified the scale and intensity of racism experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, including children and young people,” it stated.
“Aboriginal children and young people are especially vulnerable to the cumulative impacts of online abuse, which can exacerbate trauma, anxiety and disengagement from education and community life.”
In February, counter-terrorism police in WA also foiled an alleged white supremacist mass-casualty terror plot by a 20-year-old Bindoon man after a raid.
Officers allegedly discovered a haul of weapons and a manifesto detailing plans to attack WA’s Parliament House, police headquarters and mosques.
The Senator inquiry was launched in March following a referral by Indigenous Australians Minister Malarndirri McCarthy and will report back by the end of the year.
The next hearings will be in Cairns on July 29 and 30 before it’s expected to travel to the Torres Strait on July 31.
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