For more than two decades, one of the simplest pleasures of publishing a community newspaper has been telling parents that their child’s story is going online.
A sporting achievement, an academic result, a young musician, a teenager doing something unusual. Parents send photographs. Grandparents share the story. Friends leave congratulations. A young person sees that something they worked hard for mattered enough for their community to notice.
This week, I found myself writing a very different email.
The story concerned Revant, a 16-year-old whose mother, Ramya, had approached The Indian Sun. Before putting the story on Facebook and Instagram, I asked her whether she was prepared to monitor the comments.
I explained why. We increasingly encounter rude, racist and targeted comments beneath stories involving Indian Australians, and we do not have a team sitting around the clock moderating Facebook.
It pained me to send that email.
A parent should not have to weigh the pride of seeing her child’s achievement celebrated against the possibility that strangers may racially abuse him.
Ramya’s response was more hopeful than mine.
She acknowledged the anti-immigrant sentiment directed particularly towards Indians, but did not believe it should stop positive stories about Indian Australians being shared with the rest of the country. She offered to watch the comments herself and alert us if anything objectionable appeared.
She is right.
But why should a mother have to do that?
There is a tendency to treat an abusive comment as inconsequential because nobody has been physically struck. But sustained verbal aggression has consequences. It changes behaviour
This is where the debate about online hate becomes very different when viewed from a small newsroom.
We publish stories about politics, migration, sport, business, culture, education and ordinary Australian families. Stories involving Pauline Hanson and immigration can attract particularly hostile comment threads. Some accounts may be automated or coordinated. Many others appear to be ordinary people choosing to write what they write.
That distinction is important. Blaming everything on bots risks avoiding an uncomfortable truth: some of the hostility online is human.
Federal Labor MP Ash Ambihaipahar described the same problem in Parliament last week. She said accounts tell her to “go home” or declare, “You’re brown; you’re automatically wrong.” Her concern was less for herself than for younger people reading those comments and learning that this was an acceptable way to treat another person.
That should concern all of us.
There is a tendency to treat an abusive comment as inconsequential because nobody has been physically struck. But sustained verbal aggression has consequences. It changes behaviour.
People stop commenting. Parents become reluctant to share photographs. Readers avoid discussions. Businesses wonder whether advertising beside controversial stories will expose them to hostility. Publishers reconsider what they put on social media. Eventually, people who have done nothing wrong begin withdrawing from a public space.
Think of a pub where a drunken brawl breaks out every night.
Customers eventually stop coming. Families stay away. The publican loses business. Police would hardly accept the argument that the fighting is simply part of the atmosphere of the pub.
Yet the digital equivalent can happen night after night in spaces operated by some of the richest companies in history, and much of the burden of dealing with it still falls on publishers, victims and individual users.
There is another difference. A fight in a pub normally remains inside the pub. Social media recommendation systems can distribute provocative material to people who never followed the publication, know nothing about the person in the story and may have been selected precisely because the system predicts they will react.
That is why the debate over algorithms matters.
The Albanese Government has now released draft Digital Duty of Care laws that would place greater responsibility on digital services for creating safer online environments. Its proposed “My Feed, My Way” measure would require social media platforms to give Australians a choice about whether their default feed uses personalised algorithmic recommendations.
That is worth pursuing, but Parliament should also examine what happens to publishers and communities when recommendation systems repeatedly deliver their material into hostile audiences.
Our own Facebook figures illustrate how dependent community media has become on these platforms. The Indian Sun recorded 927,856 views over the 28 days to 14 September, despite views being down 24 per cent on the previous period.
Deleting comments after they appear is necessary, but it is not a regulatory model. Asking a mother to help watch the comments beneath her 16-year-old son’s story certainly isn’t one
We cannot say that abuse caused that decline. Social media reach rises and falls for many reasons. But we can say what we see inside our own newsroom: moderating hostility consumes time, changes publishing decisions and makes us more cautious about sharing stories that once would have required no such calculation.
Community media cannot solve this alone.
Deleting comments after they appear is necessary, but it is not a regulatory model. Asking a mother to help watch the comments beneath her 16-year-old son’s story certainly isn’t one.
Nor should supporting community media be regarded as something only migrant communities need to do.
Politicians, governments, businesses, institutions and readers across Australia need independent community publications to survive. They reach people mainstream outlets sometimes do not. They document achievements that would otherwise go unrecorded. They allow communities to see themselves as participants in Australian public life rather than perpetual subjects of debates about migration.
That work becomes harder when every positive story risks becoming an invitation for somebody else’s grievance.
There is a legitimate and necessary place for disagreement about immigration. There is a legitimate place for criticism of governments, migration levels and multicultural policy. None of that requires abusing a teenager, telling an Australian citizen to “go home”, or turning the comments beneath somebody’s achievement into a referendum on whether people of their ethnicity belong here.
Free speech protects vigorous disagreement. It does not require the rest of society to pretend sustained racial abuse has no cost.
For 20 years, publications such as ours have celebrated children, families, businesses and community achievements without having to ask parents to stand guard beneath their own stories.
The fact that I now feel obliged to send an email like the one I sent Ramya tells me something has changed.
Her answer tells me something else.
We should keep publishing these stories.
The people trying to make others afraid to participate in Australian public life should not get to decide who is visible in it.
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Dear Reader,The Indian Sun exists for one reason: to tell stories that might otherwise go unheard.
We report on local councils, state politics, small businesses and cultural festivals. We focus on the Indian diaspora and the wider multicultural community with care, balance and accountability. We publish in print and online, send regular newsletters and produce video content. We also run media training programs to help community organisations share their own stories.
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Community journalism does not have the backing of large media corporations. Advertising revenue fluctuates. Platform algorithms change. Costs continue to rise. Yet the need for credible, grounded reporting in a multicultural Australia has never been greater.
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The Indian Sun Team
