Hundreds of thousands of hateful comments are sitting on the Facebook feeds of Australian news publishers, according to a scan from a social media startup that is using multiple AI models to understand comment intent and context.

“Conversational intelligence” company Sence scanned 4.8m comments on 114 publisher pages and found virulent racism and violent threats among around 400,000 harmful comments attached to news stories.

The New Zealand operation — which has signed up The All Blacks, NZME and Radio New Zealand in its home market — is now pushing into Australia and is using the scan as an illustration of the extent of the problem.