On 6 May 2026, AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett stood before the cameras and said something that’s hard to ignore: “It used to take months or years to radicalise an individual, but now, in some cases, it is happening within days.” The occasion was the announcement of $74 million in federal funding for a new Counter Terrorism Online Centre (CTOC), to be jointly operated by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and Australian Security Intelligence Operations (ASIO).
The CTOC follows the December 2025 Bondi Beach attack, in which 15 people were killed and more than 40 wounded at a Chanukah gathering—Australia’s deadliest terrorist incident since Port Arthur. The horror of that attack accelerated conversations already underway about the role of online spaces in facilitating radicalisation, recruitment, and incitement. The $74 million investment is, in many ways, the policy response to that national reckoning.
What the CTOC actually does?
The Centre is designed to give ASIO and the AFP a dedicated, coordinated capability to monitor the digital spaces where extremism festers, such as social media platforms, gaming environments, online forums, and the dark web. Commissioner Barrett described it as both a disruption tool and an early warning system for the nation’s Joint Counter Terrorism Teams, helping identify emerging hate groups and individuals on a trajectory toward violence. Critically, she emphasised the integration of human and artificial intelligence to detect and disrupt extremist recruiters and inciters, while also delivering those at risk of being influenced by extremist ideas before they commit harm.
From a policing perspective, this is a meaningful escalation. The AFP has already filed 31 charges for online extremism offences and 19 of those involve minors. That statistic alone signals the scale of the challenge and the age at which Australians are now being exposed to, and drawn into, extremist ecosystems. It also reflects something researchers have flagged for a while; exposure to extremist material is no longer confined to fringe corners of the internet–it increasingly overlaps with the mainstream gaming and social platforms young people already spend their time on.
Why this matters beyond counter-terrorism?
For those of us working in cybercrime and digital criminology, the CTOC announcement speaks to dynamics that extend well beyond terrorism. The same infrastructures that enable violent extremism—encrypted platforms, gaming chat rooms, decentralised forums, the anonymity of the dark web, also dissemination of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), harassment, scams, and a range of other digital harms. The research consistently shows that these aren’t parallel universes, they are overlapping ones. It also raises questions about how funding and attention get distributed; if terrorism-labelled harms attract dedicated centres and budgets while structurally similar harms (like CSAM or large-scale scams) stay comparatively under-resourced, the response risks chasing the most visible threat rather than the full landscape of digital harm.
What’s particularly significant is the explicit acknowledgement that the digital and physical worlds are no longer meaningfully separate. Commissioner Barrett described “the blurred boundary of the virtual and real worlds” as central to the threat landscape. This is a framing researchers have long argued for, and it matters enormously for how we design policy responses. Harmful online behaviour doesn’t stay online, it shapes attitudes, normalises violence, and in most extreme cases, produces real-world atrocities like Bondi.
The challenges ahead
Effective online monitoring raises serious civil liberties questions. Who decides what constitutes an “emerging hate group”? What oversight mechanisms govern the AFP and ASIO’s surveillance of online spaces? There is also a concern worth noting; a centre established in response to an attack on one religious minority carries a well-documented risk of disproportionately surveilling others. Australian counter-terrorism powers have a track record of falling hardest on Muslim communities and political activists rather than being applied evenly.
There’s also a definitional problem which does not garner enough attention. Much of the language used by extremist actors online isn’t crude or obviously violent, instead its deliberately coded, ironic or framed as ‘just asking questions’. Askarzai (2025) discusses how in research on neutralisation techniques shows that justification, denial and minimisation are often baked into extremist discourse itself, not just used after the fact to excuse violence. That makes it genuinely hard for any monitoring systems – human or AI – to distinguish early-stage radicalisation from edge political commentary, especially when the people doing the radicalising are skilled at managing that ambiguity. The CTOC will need to grapple with this line constantly and getting it wrong in either direction has costs; too cautious and genuine threats slip through, too aggressive and you’re back to the civil liberties problem above.
There are also real limits to what intelligence-led policing alone can achieve. Radicalisation is a social process, not simply a digital one, and the CTOC is better placed to catch those already drawn into extremist ecosystems than to address the upstream conditions — isolation, grievance, identity crisis — that create vulnerability in the first place. Much of this radicalisation happens in encrypted gaming and messaging platforms where visibility is limited, and relying on AI to process that volume brings its own risks around accuracy and bias, with success too easily measured by charges laid rather than harm prevented.
The CTOC represents a serious and necessary step. But for those of us who study digital harms, the more important question isn’t just whether we can watch the web more effectively—it’s whether we can make it a less fertile ground for harm in the first place. That’s the harder, longer, and arguably more important work.
Relevant recent publications from the Author/s:
Askarzai, B. (2025). Neo-Nazis, neutralisations, and narratives: Identifying techniques of neutralisation within Australian right-wing extremist groups’ narrative construction [Doctoral dissertation, Queensland University of Technology]. QUT ePrints. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/261418/
Author Bios:
Dr Sahana Sarkar is a Lecturer in Criminology at Flinders University. She completed her Doctorate in Criminology from Queensland University of Technology in 2023. Her doctoral thesis was on exploring women survivors’ experiences of, responses to, and impact of technology-facilitated sexual violence in India. Her research focuses on how technology facilitates gendered and sexual violence by unknown persons and intimate partners within the Global South. Sahana’s research also explores digital literacy to understand how individuals employ safety practices and how marginalised identities influence it. Dr Sahana Sarkar is also a member of the Jeff Bleich Centre for Democracy and Disruptive Technologies.
Dr Benafsha Askarzai is a Lecturer in the School of Law and Society at the University of the Sunshine Coast. She recently completed her PhD at Queensland University of Technology, where her doctoral research examined the narrative construction and techniques of neutralisation employed by Australian right-wing extremist groups. Her broader research interests span violent extremism, radicalisation, and political discourse, with a particular focus on the Australian context. Her current research focuses on the discursive and ideological mechanisms that underpin extremist recruitment and engagement, with implications for counter-extremism policy and practice.
