Rescue work continues in the aftermath of catastrophic flooding in Nepal and Tibet. News sites have been hit by racist comments about missing Australians. Photograph: Arun Sankar/AFP/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Rescue work continues in the aftermath of catastrophic flooding in Nepal and Tibet. News sites have been hit by racist comments about missing Australians. Photograph: Arun Sankar/AFP/Getty Images Nepal-Tibet flood disaster Australians missing in Nepal targeted by ‘heartbreaking’ and ‘abhorrent’ racist slurs As families await news after the catastrophe, community members appeal for compassion in the face of hateful rhetoric
Australians missing in the Nepal floods: what we know so far
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Prefer the Guardian on Google A slew of racist social media comments have been made towards Australians missing in the catastrophic Nepal-Tibet floods , prompting calls for greater accountability of major platforms to remove hateful rhetoric.
On Monday, the total number of Australians missing after flash floods triggered by a massive glacier collapse in the Himalayas rose to 43, and the overall death toll was at least 810 people.
Most of the missing Australians were on pilgrimages , including to Mount Kailash in Tibet, which is a sacred site for Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and followers of the Bon faith. Fourteen are Sydney-based members of the Australia Bharatha Brahmin Samaj community.
As families and friends face an agonising wait to learn the fate of their loved ones, mainstream media outlets including News Corp, Channel 7, Channel 10 and Nine have been hit with highly offensive and discriminatory comments on Facebook articles identifying the missing Australians in Nepal.
Some outlets, including Guardian Australia, have limited who can comment on posts about the missing tourists after receiving strings of racist replies on social media.
One Daily Telegraph article received dozens of comments on Facebook from people claiming that missing citizens who were not white weren’t Australian, which were later deleted. One said: “Hoping we have new vacancies in Australia that Aussies can fill.”
The outlet’s editor, Ben English, said the comments on the post were “abhorrent” and “have no place on our platforms”.
“We are responsible for the comment threads on our pages and we take that responsibility seriously … But no automated filter reliably catches racism expressed in coded language,” he said.
Rescue efforts continue as 43 Australians remain missing in Nepal – video “Where we cannot actively moderate a thread on a sensitive story, we will close it – and we have moved to do that here.”
The comments have also proliferated on X. One post by conservative commentator Kobie Thatcher, who wrote “Aussie family” in quotation marks alongside an image of an identified missing couple, was viewed 3.2m times.
Associate Prof at QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre, Tim Graham, said hateful rhetoric had been increasing on social media platforms for the past decade.
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Read more “The design architecture of these websites, the algorithms that they use to curate content and put it into feeds, rewards this kind of stuff,” he said.
“It brings out the worst in people, but it also plays into the political economy of these platforms where rage bait, extreme content or borderline content … attrac…