Tragedy in the Himalayas, Monetised Cruelty at Home

Disasters used to prompt universal sympathy, or at least a brief pause in domestic political bickering. That tradition appears to have expired. When a massive glacier collapsed in the Himalayas, triggering flash floods across Nepal and Tibet that left at least 810 people dead, one might have expected Australian public attention to focus on the human tragedy. Among the dead and missing are 43 Australian citizens, including 14 Sydney residents from the Australia Bharatha Brahmin Samaj community who were on a pilgrimage to Mount Kailash, a site sacred to Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Bon followers.

Instead of basic empathy, news reports detailing the missing travellers provoked a torrent of online vitriol. Major media outlets across Australia found their social media comment sections inundated with discriminatory abuse questioning whether non-white citizens truly belonged to the nation. One post on X by conservative commentator Kobie Thatcher, which placed the phrase "Aussie family" in quotation marks alongside a photograph of a missing couple, accumulated 3.2 million views. On Facebook, readers left remarks suggesting that the tragedy at least created new vacancies back home for real Australians.

The response from publishers was swift but revealingly desperate. Publications like the Daily Telegraph chose to disable comments on sensitive stories altogether. Editor Ben English noted that no automated filter reliably catches racism expressed in coded language, leaving manual deletion or complete shutdown as the only operational choices.

This breakdown highlights an obvious economic dynamic. As Tim Graham of QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre observed, modern social media platforms are deliberately engineered to reward extreme content and political rage bait, as high engagement directly drives profitability. While platforms possess advanced technical tools and generative AI capable of detecting subtle abuse at scale, they remain conspicuously reluctant to deploy them during acute crises.

Race Discrimination Commissioner Giridharan Sivaraman argued that this online abuse reflects a broader domestic political discourse surrounding migration, amplified by far-right groups targeting the Indian diaspora. Sivaraman noted that hate speech remains lucrative for tech giants, renewing calls for a mandatory digital duty of care for platforms operating in Australia. Meanwhile, community leaders such as Surinder Jain of the Hindu Council of Australia and Chiran Tiwari of the Nepalese Australian Welfare Society simply urged the public to show dignity toward grieving families. When grief itself becomes raw material for engagement algorithms, the question is no longer just how platforms moderate content, but why society tolerates business models that monetise human calamity.

Written by Thomas Nussbaumer thomas.nussbaumer@alpineweekly.com