Fahad Ali

Content Warning: This page is an archive of the racist abuse I have received online. Some of the examples contained on this page are violent and extreme.

I am a bioinformatician, molecular geneticist, and research scientist. I am also a Palestinian-Australian community organiser. This page once hosted my CV, but I have decided to repurpose it for this project.

As someone who is visibly engaged in advocacy and public discourse, I am a regular target of racist harassment on social media. I have created this page to highlight the intense volume of racism that I recieve on an almost daily basis, and to demonstrate the endemic nature of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian racism in Australia.

Racism on X is Endemic

Under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth), it is unlawful to "do an act, otherwise than in private, if: the act is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people; and (b) the act is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all of the people in the group."

It is also an offence, under section 474.17 of the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth) to use a carriage service in such a way "that reasonable persons would regard as being, in all the circumstances, menacing, harassing or offensive."

Despite the established measures under Australian law that are meant to prevent and prohibit racist harassment, including when that harassment occurs online, it appears that governments, social media platforms, police, and the online regulator do not recognise or take seriously the severity of hate speech directed against Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians. This is perhaps reflected most clearly in Senator Dave Sharma's claims that Islamophobia is "fictitious" and "not going on".    

But the evidence begs to differ. The tweet below, which appears to be a clear-cut breach of our current hate speech laws, was deemed acceptable by X:

So too was this tweet, despite the use of obscene language and dehumanising language:

In both cases, I recieved the following notification: "We're writing to let you know that after reviewing the available information, we didn't find a violation of our rules in the content you reported."

At the same time, legitimate speech critical of Israel is marked by X as "violent speech". It is remarkable that, on X, you can call someone "inbred" and suggest they "fuck off back to Gaza" and you can be in the clear, while reasonable speech that does not intimidate, humiliate, insult, or harass is penalised.

I requested an appeal of this decision, and I was told: "we will not overturn our decision to limit your postā€™s visibility." It is one thing for X moderators to have a political bias in favour of Israel, but quite another when this exists alongside a seeming willingness to permit some of the most heinous examples of racism and harassment, including explicit calls for my deportation:

I am an Australian citizen and Australian citizen alone. There exists no legal mechanism for me to be deported. I have not committed any serious criminal offence that would, if I were a dual national, enable the relevant Minister to seek an order for revocation of my citizenship. I am exercising my right, as an Australian citizen, to engage in political communication.

I am being pedantic here for a purpose: because it should demonstrate that these deportation calls do not rely on anything I have done, but on who I am: a person of colour with an Arabic name, who is presumed to be Muslim based solely on this fact alone. A white person who holds similar opinions to me would not face these deportation calls. Therefore, it is necessarily a racist call. And yet, this kind of racist incitement is deemed acceptable by X.

In Faruqi v Hanson [2024] FCA 1264, Justice Stewart determined that the slogan "go back to where you came from" is a racist trope and accepted evidence that it is a "fairly strong form of racism". It was established that Senator Hanson's use of the phrase "piss off back to Pakistan" was a variant on this slogan. Senator Hanson was found to have acted unlawfully in publishing a tweet containing this language. Nonetheless, a tweet containing very much the same langauge - "piss off [to Palestine]" - was deemed acceptable by X:

The impact of this relentless abuse cannot be understated. They create an enormous amount of mental strain and anguish, with flow-on effects on well-being, mental health, and performance in the workplace. Neo-Nazi figures, who I will not cite, openly encourage online racist abuse to terrorise and exhaust people of colour. The consequences, for us, when we retaliate are often more extreme than the consequences for those engaged in racist provocation.

But there must be consequences. If governments are serious about "social cohesion" they cannot continue to ignore the febrile Islamophobia in our society that has become widespread and normalised to the point that people feel comfortable enough to breach hate speech laws. And they feel comfortable because neither the police, nor the regulator, nor the social media platforms themselves seem to want to do anything about it.

An Archive of Racist Abuse

The volume of the abuse that I endure online is so extensive that that capturing, reporting, and responding to the abuse is difficult and time-consuming. In order to capture racist tweets, I have created a browser extension that allows single-click exporting of tweets to a database file. I then code and categorise these tweets by the specific X rule I believe has been violated, and create archive links to preserve the tweets for research purposes, in case the original tweets are deleted or taken down.

Each tweet is reported to X based on the rule violation I consider most likely. I have reported almost 100 tweets to X as part of this project - so far no violations have been found. Once I have a sizeable volume of data to analyse I will begin to write-up some insights.

Please note that this is a living document, and the archive is liable to change. I cannot display all tweets in the database on this page, but I will try to display those that are most relevant or illustrative of the problem.