An April 13 knife attack at a mall in Sydney, Australia, unleashed misleading claims about the attacker and his motives.
Speaking into a camera, a man in an April 13 Instagram reel said people would be seeing claims that the incident was an “Islamic terrorist attack.”
“As I explained in the previous video,” the man continued, “it is a Zionist attacker who attacked Jewish in a shopping mall area in Sydney … the guy’s name is Ben Cohen and he’s Jewish.”
He said the attacker carried out the incident to falsely suggest an Islamic terrorist had done it.
We saw similar claims on Facebook identifying the attacker as a “Jewish terrorist,” “a radical Jew, or “Benjamin Cohen.” On X, some posts described him as a “Zionist.”
These posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
That’s because none of this is accurate.
(Screenshot from Instagram)
New South Wales police identified the suspect as Joel Cauchi, 40, of Queensland. Police said Cauchi attacked a police officer; the officer shot Cauchi, who died before paramedics could arrive.
Police Commissioner Anthony Cooke said in an April 13 press conference that Cauchi suffered from mental health issues and that there was no evidence that the attack was driven by any “particular motivation, ideology, or otherwise.”
“We are continuing to work through the profiling of the offender but very clearly to us at this stage, it would appear that this is related to the mental health of the individual involved,” Cooke said.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that social media posts falsely identified Ben Cohen, a 20-year-old Jewish student at the University of Technology Sydney, as the attacker. The paper said the misleading claim started spreading April 13, hours before investigators released the attacker’s name. Cohen’s father took to X to call on police to release the real name of the suspect.
We rate the claim that the Sydney attacker was a “Zionist” who targeted Jewish people so that people would think the attacker was Muslim False.
