A Liverpool City Councillor has landed himself in hot water after claiming gatherings of Muslim men taking place outside of mosques were amplifying a so-called “underbelly of radical Islam”, and using an AI generated image to do so.
Liverpool City Councillor Peter Ristevski alleged groups of Muslim men are causing “traffic chaos” and “parking overflow” by choosing to conduct afternoon prayer groups at mixed-use public facilities, in a move which has been condemned as “disgraceful” by the Australian National Imams Council.
Mr Ristevski said community centres and public gathering spaces were being “used in ways they were never designed for” in a Facebook post which received hundreds of reactions and comments after it was posted on March 25.
“For too long, this mayor and the Liberals have let community facilities be used in ways they were never designed for, as regular pray halls, while local residents are left to suffer the consequences,” Mr Ristevski said.
“Every week, families are dealing with traffic chaos, parking overflow, noise and disruption, quiet suburban streets under pressure … residents (are) being ignored in their own suburbs,” he said.
“Chipping Norton is a residential suburb. It is not a dumping ground for bad planning. It is not a place where residents should be forced to lose their peace and quiet because Council refuses to act. And it is not acceptable for local families to be treated like they do not matter.”
The post was accompanied by a photorealistic AI-generated image of what appears to be a large group of Muslim men praying in the car park of the Chipping Norton Community Center.
The image features a number of glaring inconsistencies with reality, which include an unreadable car number plate, alterations to the building itself and a group of men praying in the wrong direction relative to Mecca.
It is understood that a group of Muslim men does gather at the Chipping Norton Community Center for afternoon prayers every Friday, but real images of these gatherings are yet to surface from either the Councillor or any public communication channels.
Mr Ristevski actively denied allegations of using AI-generated imagery in the comment section of his post.
One user asked him “is this real,” to which Mr Ristevski replied “yes, this happens every Friday”.
When another commenter pointed out the image as being AI generated, Mr Ristevski angry-reacted and responded “No, this actually happens every single Friday and the community are fed up”.
Mr Ristevski’s account also liked a comment which said “tear gas them”, though he later denied personally supporting the comment saying that his content moderation team liked comments to “maximise the algorithm”.
Speaking to NewsWire, the councillor said the AI image was given to him by a Chipping Norton resident who finds the gatherings of Muslim men at the community centre “intimidating”.
“It was given to me by one of the residents who live around there, and they have had enough. They actually find it intimidating,” Mr Ristevski said.
When asked if he had double checked the authenticity of the picture with the unnamed resident, he said he liked to take people “at face value”.
The councillor also confirmed he had never spoken to members of the prayer group.
Australian National Imams Council President Imam Shadi Alsuleiman said the post and accompanying comments were “extremely disturbing”.
“It’s absolutely appalling … the councillor’s comments have raised many complaints about his Islamophobic conduct and narrative. Muslims, like almost everyone else in Australia, want to live peacefully and in harmony with the rest of society,” Imam Alsuleiman said.
“Comments like these, that come across as Islamophobic and anti-Muslim prejudice, create anxiety, division, and undermine social harmony,” he said.
“No one has the right to spread that hate. He is not fit to be a councillor.”
“The local government area he represents is multicultural, including approximately 60,000 Muslims. Comments like that contribute to the concerning rise in Islamophobic incidents and anti-Muslim hate.”
UNSW Scientia Professor and former editor-in-chief of the Journal of AI Research, Toby Walsh, said the average person viewing the image on their phone would most likely assume it was real.
“I think it would be hard to spot on the small size of your phone from a quick glance that it wasn’t actually real. You can probably spot it on your laptop, but it’s much harder when it’s on a little screen,” Professor Walsh said.
“It used to be that there were some ‘tells’ in AI images, where you could count the fingers on a hand or you could look at the various things that could easily give it away, but those things now don’t exist,” he said.
“The quality has gotten even better, and it’s very hard to tell from the imagery itself that it is not real.”
Gazing over the image, Professor Walsh said a real picture would probably feature “a bit more irregularity to it”, and ultimately the biggest giveaway would be where the image came from and what story it was trying to tell.
“The problem is, you can’t forget the things that you’ve seen. You can’t forget you’ve seen this image now … and clearly that’s what people intend. They intend that even if it gets debunked at some point that they’ll have left an impression,” he said.
“It’s troubling that the technology is allowing this sort of harm to happen.”
Mr Ristevski currently employs a team of content moderators to administer his social media pages, and he says they like certain comments posted on his official Liverpool City Councillor account to “maximise the algorithm”.
“In our theory of managing the thousands and thousands of comments that we get, there is no way to manage it unless you like that post, and then it removes it from the list of (comments) that you haven’t responded to,” Mr Ristevski said.
“Obviously I don’t support that (tear gas comment) … that’s silly … a post that I did recently got over 250,000 views and more than 4000 comments, do you think that I’ve got time to respond? It’s no different to any other politician,” he said.
“Do you think the Premier sits there on his Facebook?”
Mr Ristevski said that he “could not give two f**ks about Islamophobia,” which is a term he believes is deliberately used to “shut down debate”.
“The residents have raised serious concerns. As a councillor, I’m obligated to attend to those concerns.”
According to the NSW Office of Local Government’s model social media policy, councillors “are responsible for the administration and moderation of their own social media platforms,” even “in circumstances where another person administers, moderates or uploads content onto their social media platform”.
In 2023, Mr Ristevski was found guilty of distributing fake electoral material which featured the likeness of Holsworthy MP Tina Ayyad. He was convicted and fined.
The group that gathers at the community centre have been sought for comment.
In March, Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia Aftab Malik said there had been an “unprecedented rise” in Islamophobia following the Bondi terror attack.
“While reported incidents skyrocketed by 740 per cent in the fortnight that followed the attack, the figure represents only the surface of a deeper fear of reporting that has paralysed our community,” Mr Malik said.
“This attack saw a rise in the number of mosques receiving threatening and violent letters in addition to being vandalised, Muslim women have been spat at, abused, attacked, harassed, threatened to be killed and raped and that’s on top of a tsunami of online hate,” he said.
“Each impact reinforces a sense that Muslim identity is not welcome, nor part of Australia’s social fabric. This has the immense danger of reducing institutional legitimacy and fraying social cohesion.”
