Here is the question that Australia's royal commission into antisemitism must eventually confront: when hatred spreads at algorithmic speed across platforms designed by engineers in California, who bears responsibility for the consequences felt in communities from Bondi to Brunswick?
Royal commissions derive their power from naming names. The banking royal commission worked because it put individual executives under oath and forced them to account for decisions that had devastated ordinary Australians. The aged care commission worked because it identified systemic failures with human faces attached. Commissions that confine themselves to broad structural recommendations, while sparing the powerful from direct scrutiny, tend to produce reports that gather dust on ministerial shelves.
The inquiry into antisemitism in Australia is examining a genuine crisis. Since October 7, 2023, Jewish Australians have reported alarming increases in harassment, threats, and vilification, much of it originating on or amplified by social media platforms. The platforms are not passive conduits; they are active architects of the information environments their users inhabit. Their recommendation algorithms, content moderation policies, and monetisation decisions shape what millions of Australians see every day.
This is where Mark Zuckerberg becomes relevant. As chief executive of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, he is the single individual most responsible for the design choices that govern how content reaches Australian users. When Meta's systems amplify posts calling for violence against Jewish people, or when they fail to act on reported content that plainly violates their own standards, that reflects decisions made at the executive level about where to invest in moderation resources and what content policies to enforce.
The counter-argument deserves serious consideration: Zuckerberg is an American citizen running an American company, and a royal commission in Canberra has no power to compel his appearance. Subpoenas do not cross the Pacific. There is also a legitimate free speech dimension; the line between offensive speech and prohibited speech is contested in any liberal democracy, and reasonable people disagree about where platforms should draw it. Critics from the civil liberties tradition would argue that coercing a private company's chief executive to answer to a foreign government sets a troubling precedent.
These objections have force. But they do not fully grapple with what is actually happening. Meta operates in Australia, earns advertising revenue from Australian businesses, and is subject to Australian law in numerous respects, including the Online Safety Act. The Australian government has already demonstrated, through the news media bargaining code, that it is willing to exercise real leverage over platform behaviour when domestic interests are at stake. The question is whether protecting Jewish Australians from online vilification is treated with the same political urgency as protecting news publishers' revenue.
Strip away the diplomatic complications and what remains is a fundamental accountability question. If the royal commission concludes that social media platforms have materially contributed to the spread of antisemitism in Australia, the public deserves to understand why platform executives made the choices they did. Written submissions and corporate responses filtered through public relations departments are not the same as sworn testimony.
History will judge this moment by whether Australia demanded the same standard of accountability from powerful technology companies that it has historically demanded from banks, aged care providers, and institutions that failed Australians in other ways. The royal commission cannot force Zuckerberg into a chair. What it can do is make unmistakably clear that his absence is noticed, his written responses insufficient, and that Australian policymakers should act accordingly when licensing, taxation, and regulatory decisions about Meta's local operations come before them in the years ahead.
Originally reported by the Sydney Morning Herald.