Bondi attack misinformation sparks Pakistanis’ vilification 

SYDNEY, Australia (MNTV) — As misinformation tore through social media in the aftermath of the Bondi Beach attack, some Pakistanis in Australia bore the consequences, reports SBS News.

Naveed Akram, a Pakistani migrant living in NSW, shares a name with one of the men accused of carrying out the terrorist attack.

He feared for his life after he was wrongly identified online as one of the shooters on Sunday evening.

But the damage didn’t stop there.

Zeeshan Iqbal, a Sydney resident of Pakistani background, said his son was questioned by classmates at school about Pakistani involvement in Sunday’s violence, which left 15 people dead.

“He was made uncomfortable and effectively singled out for something that was completely untrue,” Iqbal told SBS Urdu.

The harm brought by false information doesn’t just stay on social media, he observed. “It shows up in people’s lives, in classrooms, in offices. It affects my children.”

It’s become commonplace for false and misleading claims to circulate during and after natural disasters, violent attacks and other major incidents.

“These rumors, they are filling up the gap of verified information,” Iqbal said. “And minority communities in Australia, especially, we become targets.  By the time the truth is clarified, harm is already done.”

The alleged attacker Naveed Akram was born in Australia. His father Sajid Akram, the second alleged gunman who was fatally shot by police, was an Indian citizen. Incorrect claims about the younger Akram’s background proliferated across platforms such as Facebook and X in the hours after the attack.

In some cases, it has remained online.

SBS News has seen multiple X posts, still online at the time of publishing, that falsely identify one of the alleged attackers as a Pakistani. The posts now have hundreds of reshares and hundreds of thousands of impressions or views.

Several YouTube videos with tens of thousands of views — which contain the same false claims — also remain online. “This is, I think, a broader issue now,” Iqbal said. “And governments and media organizations and big social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, they should do something about it, otherwise, it’s just going to be a bombshell in the future.”

The federal government sought to introduce laws in late 2024 that would have seen social media companies fined up to 5 percent of their annual turnover for spreading misinformation and disinformation.

Facing opposition from both the Coalition and Greens in the Senate, the government abandoned the proposed legislation.

‘Within the first hour, people started blaming’

Iqbal wasn’t the only local of Pakistani heritage to experience fear or vilification after misinformation about the Bondi attacker spread online. “That information, it led [to] a lot of discomfort to me,” Talha Rehmani, a man of Pakistani background living in Australia, told SBS Urdu.

“Just because the names are similar, [people were] saying that he’s from Pakistan and everyone was thinking [the alleged attackers] are from Pakistan,” he said.

“Within the first hour, people started blaming.”

“Even one of my friends … his last name is Akram, and he does ride share [driving] sometimes, but people come and ask, and he has to tell them he’s not that Akram.”

Rehmani said that — knowing his friends, colleagues and classmates may have been looking at social media after the attacks occurred — he was “really impacted” by the misinformation.

“It can cause problems for us, especially for the Pakistani people … We may have to face the consequences of this false information.”