The Australian government is to clamp down on internet incitement after the death of a Melbourne teenager who was radicalised online and talked of launching a bombing campaign in the city.
Ministers have pledged an $A18 million (£9.3 million) counteroffensive in response to what they say is a huge upsurge in propaganda from Australian Islamic State sympathisers on sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
The government is yet to give details of how the offensive will work, but Julie Bishop, the foreign minister, said that it would include a demand that sites take serious steps to reduce the volume of material promoting Isis and other extremist causes.
The moves come after the apparent death in Iraq on Wednesday of Jake Bilardi, 18, an Isis recruit who drove a van packed with explosives on a suicide-bombing mission in the city of Ramadi. He dropped out of his Melbourne high school last year to travel on a one-way ticket to the Middle East, helped by extremists he had met online.
The government is deeply troubled by an online “manifesto” published by Bilardi, who described how he became an extremist whilst attending school in Melbourne and accessed Islamist material on his school-supplied laptop. His 4,500 word posting, entitled From Melbourne to Ramadi: My Journey, came to light after his death.
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It revealed that if he had been unable to get to the Middle East, he planned to conduct knife and bomb attacks in Melbourne. More postings uploaded shortly before his death emerged yesterday, all written under the name Abu Abdulla al-Australi.
They reveal the loathing that he had developed for his homeland. Under a photograph of shoppers pictured in a central Melbourne mall, Bilardi wrote on January 15: “The talking pigs of Melbourne, Australia, in their sty.”
He called Australia “a land full of such filth and corruption that no one in their right mind could live there without a craving to let some heads roll”.