74
Pakistani man living in Australia describes ‘nightmare’ of wrongly being labelled as Bondi attacker
(www.theguardian.com)
Akram said he had gone to the police to report the misinformation but they had just told him to disable all his social media accounts. He said he was also unable to reach X to get their assistance. Instead he resorted to making his own video which he posted to Facebook and Twitter, in a bid to clarify that he had been wrongly identified and called for the posts with his photograph to be reported and taken down.
The response of the police is grossly inadequate in this case. With the kind of hatred that results from the mass shooting, this man's life is obviously in danger of some angry, upset person deciding to attack him for retribution and revenge. Disabling his own social media accounts does nothing to prevent this. The police should have contacted the social media companies with the authority of a government agency to have them deal with the issue promptly. Or they should have referred the issue to some other government agency empowered to act. It's not adequate to simply age verify everyone but let such dangerous misinformation go unchecked.