{"id":1036056,"date":"2026-09-01T01:50:24","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T01:50:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1036056\/"},"modified":"2026-09-01T01:50:24","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T01:50:24","slug":"australians-missing-in-nepal-targeted-by-heartbreaking-and-abhorrent-racist-slurs-nepal-tibet-flood-disaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1036056\/","title":{"rendered":"Australians missing in Nepal targeted by \u2018heartbreaking\u2019 and \u2018abhorrent\u2019 racist slurs | Nepal-Tibet flood disaster"},"content":{"rendered":"

A slew of racist social media comments have been made towards Australians missing in the catastrophic Nepal-Tibet floods<\/a>, prompting calls for greater accountability of major platforms to remove hateful rhetoric.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Most of the missing Australians were on pilgrimages<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

One Daily Telegraph article received dozens of comments on Facebook from people claiming that missing citizens who were not white weren\u2019t Australian, which were later deleted. One said: \u201cHoping we have new vacancies in Australia that Aussies can fill.\u201d<\/p>\n

The outlet\u2019s editor, Ben English, said the comments on the post were \u201cabhorrent\u201d and \u201chave no place on our platforms\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are responsible for the comment threads on our pages and we take that responsibility seriously \u2026 But no automated filter reliably catches racism expressed in coded language,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere we cannot actively moderate a thread on a sensitive story, we will close it \u2013 and we have moved to do that here.\u201d<\/p>\n

The comments have also proliferated on X. One post by conservative commentator Kobie Thatcher, who wrote \u201cAussie family\u201d in quotation marks alongside an image of an identified missing couple, was viewed 3.2m times.<\/p>\n

Associate Prof at QUT\u2019s Digital Media Research Centre, Tim Graham, said hateful rhetoric had been increasing on social media platforms for the past decade.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe design architecture of these websites, the algorithms that they use to curate content and put it into feeds, rewards this kind of stuff,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt 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 \u2026 attracts so much attention.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said platforms had the technical infrastructure and the resources to push back against harmful content, including generative AI models that could detect \u201cnuanced content at scale\u201d, but weren\u2019t using it for moderation.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really don\u2019t understand why that can\u2019t be applied in special circumstances to a really terrible humanitarian catastrophe like this,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a bit mind-boggling.\u201d<\/p>\n

The race discrimination commissioner, Giridharan Sivaraman, said he wasn\u2019t surprised by the comments, which he connected to Australia\u2019s current debate on migrants.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re saying, you don\u2019t deserve to \u2026 be seen as Australian. And that\u2019s amplified by the rhetoric of far-right populist parties,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe should be very concerned because it\u2019s indicative of a real rise in white supremacy ideology \u2026 Words have consequences \u2026 It\u2019s heartbreaking.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sivaraman said racism was \u201cprofitable\u201d for social media companies, and the notion they were attempting to stop hate speech on their platforms was \u201cfanciful\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is just more evidence as to why we need a digital duty of care for all social media platforms that operate in Australia,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Hindu Council of Australia vice-president Surinder Jain said it was \u201csaddening\u201d to see people making use of a tragedy to \u201cexpress their displeasure with the government\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI \u2026 ask them to show some dignity to those who have perished and the families of those who are mourning their loss: give them a fair go,\u201d he told Guardian Australia.<\/p>\n

Australia\u2019s Indian diaspora, which includes Hindus, has been the target of racist comments from far-right movements including March for Australia as immigration has emerged as a hot-button issue.<\/p>\n

Nepalese Australian Welfare Society president, Chiran Tiwari, said Australians needed to look past nationalities and have humanity.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is very hurtful and the families who are impacted feel really, really bad,\u201d he told Guardian Australia. \u201cAll of us are human.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A slew of racist social media comments have been made towards Australians missing in the catastrophic Nepal-Tibet floods,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1036057,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[23],"tags":[746,159,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-1036056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117193280567590692","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1036056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036056\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1036057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1036056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1036056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1036056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}