False claims started spreading about the Bondi Junction stabbing attac... https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/apr/15/false-claims...

False claims started spreading about the Bondi

Junction stabbing attack as soon as it happened

Ariel Bogle

The police operation in Bondi Junction was still under way on Saturday as false claims about
the attacker’s motivations and identity began to circulate online.

Police said on Sunday they had no indication that the stabbing spree committed by Queensland
man Joel Cauchi was motivated by a particular belief system – but that didn’t stop speculation
spreading on social media that the assailant was motivated by a variety of religious or political
ideologies.

“There is still to this point nothing – no information we have received, no evidence we’ve
recovered, no intelligence that we have gathered – that would suggest that this was driven by
any particular motivation, ideology or otherwise,” the NSW police assistant commissioner
Anthony Cooke said on Sunday.

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Each tragedy that attracts global attention is now an opportunity for social media accounts to
attract followers and revenue off the back of inflammatory claims, or to fit the incident into a
predetermined narrative before the facts have emerged, and this weekend was no different.

Esther Chan, a disinformation researcher, said “Islamophobic and anti-immigrant comments”

were rife online in the hours after the Bondi Junction stabbing, including speculation about the
perpetrator’s skin colour, appearance and supposed religion.

“In fact, several X accounts based outside of Australia and each with a large following were
among the earliest to share these videos, some unverified, alongside comments with a racist or
Islamophobic undertone,” she said.

“It’s important to beware of how incidents like this can be used to promote harmful narratives.”

In the aftermath of the attack, several prominent verified accounts on X, including those of
journalists and far-right political leaders in the UK, speculated without evidence that the
person responsible was motivated by Islamic faith.

The verified account of Julia Hartley-Brewer, a presenter on British channel TalkTV, claimed
the attacker was an “Islamist terrorist”, which she later clarified was incorrect. The verified
account of Britain First co-founder Paul Golding made similar allegations, which had been

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viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

The Australian Muslim Advocacy Network (AMAN) collected examples of “xenophobic and
racist” remarks made in the Facebook comment threads of Australian news outlets following
the attack on Saturday evening.

An AMAN spokesperson said they were full of dehumanising tropes about Muslim people.
“Because of the high emotion triggered by the actions, we see people’s real sentiment and
prejudice come to the fore,” the spokesperson said.

“It’s really important for social media platforms and media companies to moderate those
threads and those posts.”

Wrong attackers named

Amid the deluge of false claims, at least two people were wrongly named as the attacker on
social media – one by a major news outlet – before police officially revealed Cauchi’s identity
on Sunday morning.

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The name Benjamin Cohen began to circulate online Saturday evening, spurred on by several
verified accounts on X, some with more than 1.7 million followers and others that regularly
share antisemitic commentary.

The name also spread on Telegram, where Australian far-right accounts eagerly seized on false
allegations the perpetrator was first Muslim and then Jewish, as well as in the comment
sections of videos about the incident on Instagram and TikTok.

Accounts linked to the pro-Kremlin activist Simeon Boikov, who goes by Aussie Cossack online,
shared Cohen’s name on X and Telegram to a combined 93,000 followers on Saturday night as
well as that of another man in “unconfirmed” reports about the attacker’s identity.

“I was simply commenting on the fact that there were unconfirmed reports circulating,” Boikov
told Guardian Australia from the Russian consulate in Sydney. “At no time did I claim that was
fact.”

Guardian Australia is not suggesting Boikov published Cohen’s name due to a financial motive.

A Sydney man by the name of Benjamin Cohen, whose LinkedIn profile was shared on X by
accounts falsely claiming he resembled the attacker, said people were attempting to “push an
agenda and spread hatred”.

“It’s extremely disappointing to see thousands of people mindlessly propagating

misinformation without even the slightest thought put to fact-checking or real life

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consequences,” he said in a statement to Guardian Australia.

Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese lays flowers for Bondi Junction stabbing
victims – video

Max Kaiser, the executive officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, said the false claims
naming Cohen were spread to drive antisemitism. “We unequivocally condemn any attempts to
stoke fear, hatred, or discrimination against migrants, Muslims or Jews in the aftermath of this
horrific event.”

The false accusation was further boosted in an incident described as a “human error” by the
news outlet Seven, which incorrectly named Cohen as the perpetrator on its website and in a
YouTube caption – both since removed. He was also named on air early Sunday morning.

Seven did not respond to questions about the origin of its incorrect claim concerning Cohen.
Screenshots from the Seven website circulated as so-called “proof” of the perpetrator’s identity.

A Seven spokesperson said the network “sincerely apologises” for the error: “It was escalated
immediately and rectified,” he said.

Cohen’s name was still trending on X on Sunday, with more than 70,000 posts linking the
name to the attack.

The antifascist research group White Rose Society tracked many of the misleading claims made
about the attack over the weekend, including those from neo-Nazis accounts claiming the
offender was non-white “to fit into their anti-immigration narrative”.

“Disinformation on X is rewarded – literally financially, but also in that the first story that gets
out there is often the one that stays in people’s heads,” they said.

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