The Australian Human Rights Commission has threatened legal action against a widely read but controversial US-based website over an article that encourages racial hatred against Aborigines.

But online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia said that trying to stamp out the deplorable content would only create the "Streisand" effect, whereby an attempt to censor online content only brings more attention to it.

In a letter to Joseph Evers, the owner of Encyclopedia Dramatica (ED) - a more shocking version of Wikipedia that contains racist and other offensive articles dubbed as "satire" - the commission said it had received 20 complaints from Aborigines over the "Aboriginal" page on the site.

The same page was in the news in January when, in a rare move, Google Australia agreed to remove links to the article from its search engine following legal action from Aboriginal man Steve Hodder-Watt.

On the Australian Communication and Media Authority's blacklist of "refused classification" websites, which was leaked in March last year, encyclopediadramatica.com was included. This means the entire site will most likely be blocked under the government's forthcoming internet filtering plan.