When a politician’s electorate office gets vandalized and flooded with thousands of threatening calls, you expect them to be the primary target. But what happens when the most venomous, unhinged attacks are reserved for their partner instead?
That is exactly the reality exposed at the recent Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. Federal Labor MP Josh Burns, who is Jewish, testified about the massive scale of abuse directed at his office. We are talking over 1,000 phone calls and 10,000 abusive social media messages. Yet, Burns revealed that one of the hardest parts of the entire ordeal wasn't what he faced personally. It was watching his partner, Victorian Animal Justice Party MP Georgie Purcell, get dragged into the mud.
Purcell isn't Jewish. But because she is a woman partnered with a Jewish man, she became the lightning rod for a terrifying hybrid of online vitriol.
When Antisemitism and Misogyny Collide
The testimony laid bare a nasty phenomenon that standard political commentary often misses. Hate rarely stays in a single lane. When it targets a woman, it mutates.
Burns explained to the inquiry that Purcell faces the exact same questioning of her loyalty and the same attribution of blame for geopolitical events that he does. But it doesn't stop there. For Purcell, the online mobs added a heavy layer of violent, sexualized misogyny.
Look at the actual data and examples submitted to the commission. The rhetoric wasn't just critical of policy; it was deeply personal, explicit, and gendered. One abuser explicitly targeted her relationship, messaging her: "You root a Zionist. You can't be trusted."
It got worse after the couple celebrated the birth of their daughter. Online trolls immediately weaponized the newborn, sending messages telling her to "shut the fuck up" because she "got knocked up" by a Zionist.
This is the digital reality for women in leadership. When a man is targeted for his ethnicity, religion, or political stance, the attacks usually focus on those specific factors. When a woman is targeted for her proximity to that man, the attack vectors immediately shift to her body, her relationship, her maternal status, and her worth as a person.
The Toxic Penalty for Speaking Up
If you think stepping forward to call out this behavior helps dial it down, the data says otherwise.
Tahli Blicblau, chief executive officer of the Dor Foundation, told the inquiry that individuals who come forward to give evidence about their experiences of hate often find themselves subjected to even more of it. The moment a victim highlights the abuse, the digital crowd treats it as a green light to double down.
According to the Dor Foundation’s submission, which included 275 explicit examples out of many hundreds more, this targeted swarm happens across almost every major platform. Witnesses—whether they hold public office, represent Jewish community groups, or try to speak behind a pseudonym—face a flood of:
- Explicit calls for physical violence and murder
- Dehumanizing and degrading personal abuse
- Holocaust glorification and admiration for Hitler
- Conspiracy theories claiming the victims are merely "crisis actors"
This creates a massive democratic problem. If the tax for participating in public life or testifying before a royal commission is an avalanche of sexualized threats and digital stalking, normal people will simply opt out.
The Post-Event Spike That Never Really Goes Away
We often treat online hate as a series of isolated flashpoints. A major global event happens, a domestic tragedy occurs, and the temperature rises online for a few days before cooling off.
The research presented to the commission by Associate Professor Dr. Matteo Vergani from Deakin University's Tackling Hate Lab completely shatters that assumption.
Before the October 7 attacks in 2023, data from X (formerly Twitter) showed a very low baseline rate of hateful content targeting Jewish people. After the attack, that baseline shot up. The crucial takeaway from the Tackling Hate Lab's data is that the level didn't drop back down after the news cycle moved on. It stayed elevated.
The data also reveals that hate is cyclical and reactive. Major domestic events act as massive accelerators. For instance, while there was a noticeable spike in anti-Jewish hate immediately following the Bondi terror attack earlier this year, researchers tracked a concurrent "huge spike" in anti-Muslim hate during the exact same window.
The internet doesn't reset after a crisis. It stacks. Each new event leaves behind a higher baseline of everyday hostility.
What Needs to Change Right Now
We can't keep relying on politicians and public figures to just "have thick skin." That advice is completely useless when dealing with coordinated, algorithmic harassment. If we want to actually protect social cohesion and keep women from being driven out of public spaces, the strategy has to shift from passive monitoring to active intervention.
First, social media platforms need to be held directly accountable for algorithmic amplification. The current model rewards outrage because outrage drives engagement. When a post contains explicit combinations of gendered slurs and racial abuse, it shouldn't be pushed into thousands of feeds by an automation loop.
Second, our legal and law enforcement frameworks have to recognize the hybrid nature of modern harassment. Right now, safety systems often look at hate speech through a single lens—either it is a racial slur or it is online harassment. They don't know how to handle situations where misogyny is actively used as a vehicle to deliver antisemitic or racist abuse to someone by proxy.
If you want to support public safety and digital decency, stop treating online trolling as an abstract internet problem. Report coordinated harassment when you see it, demand transparency from platform algorithms, and back legislative measures that strip tech companies of their immunity when they profit off targeted abuse.
Georgie Purcell's parliamentary advocacy on animal welfare shows the important legislative work crossbench MPs do when they aren't forced to navigate a wall of digital abuse. This video highlights her focus on science and research directives in the Victorian Parliament, illustrating the exact type of public work that gets overshadowed by online hostility.
