Scroll through any social media site long enough and you have a good chance of seeing a racist post. Interact with it and you could be exposed to a vile side of social media.

Mohit Sharma, an IT engineer at an Australian high school, has observed a torrent of abusive posts targeted at Indians in Australia growing larger and more vitriolic.

Anti-Indian posts from anonymous accounts on Meta-owned platforms Facebook and Instagram have attracted hundreds of thousands of likes while spreading misinformation and harmful stereotypes under the guise of internet meme culture.

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Some accounts further down the rabbit hole post AI-generated videos with captions such as “nuke India”, while others go a step further by pushing white nationalist messaging to whip up anti-immigration sentiment.

The spread of hateful posts on these platforms is raising concern among the Indian-Australian community, who fear they may be considered outsiders for generations to come.

Research by former IT engineer Mohit Sharma suggests racist posts targeting Indians are being amplified across social media platforms. Credit: Mohit Sharma

Sharma first became worried when he was alerted to a racist post shared by a student at the school where he works.

He feared such content was breaking out of the underbelly of social media and was beginning to ensnare mostly teenage boys in a racist pipeline, so he decided to run an experiment.

Sharma created three new social media accounts on Facebook and Instagram in order to see how fast someone could be grouped in with openly racist users, tracking the progress over a “horrible” 16 months.

He said one of the accounts was first caught in the spiral by a post of a man spitting on the street in India.

“The moment you interact a little bit, you suddenly fall into an algorithm full of, just, extreme hatred, misinformation and disinformation and AI generated content,” Sharma told 7NEWS.com.au.

“Even if you have a little bias and you fall into that algorithm, those biases will be confirmed and then you’ll become more hateful against one community.

“That was horrible because if I’m a child, for example in a high school, how would that affect me in the future?”

Sharma had noticed that even positive or supportive posts about Indians, including those about family tragedies, would be spread into the racist pipeline and targeted with abuse.

The result, he says, is Indian-Australians feeling increasingly alienated.

“I can see it in the community; people see these posts and they start to think they are bad,” Sharma said.

Sharma spent more than a year recording racist posts on Meta platforms including Instagram, some with hundreds of thousands of likes. Credit: Michael Dwyer/AP

Little is being done by Meta to stop the tide of abuse, Sharma says.

“It’s happening too much and a lot of people try to complain about those posts ... And even after reporting, they aren’t disappearing.

“In the past, they used to be taken down immediately but now it’s not happening.

“A lot of young people are extremely stressed, exhausted and think it’s bound to happen and normal. It’s not good.”

A collation of more than a year’s worth of “racist language, dehumanising statements, threats and descriptions of discriminatory conduct” became the basis of a report authored by Sharma and released in late June.

“The evidence collected revealed recurring patterns of hostility, amplification, recommendation behaviours and political messaging that warrant further independent examination,” the report reads.

“If left unexamined, such environments may contribute to the normalisation of prejudice, increased social division, declining trust between communities and growing concerns regarding the integrity of online public discourse.”

Sharma hopes the report can help raise the issue through government channels and spur on change to protect not only the Indian community in Australia, but other communities targeted by racial abuse on social media.

“We have to make sure that people understand that this is social media amplified hate,” he said.

“We must take action against these echo chambers, because minors don’t know what is right and what is wrong.

“If they accidentally fall into those algorithms, their lives could be destroyed forever.”

7NEWS.com.au approached Meta for comment.