Earlier this year, the Australia’s eSafety commissioner took X to court over its refusal to remove videos of a religiously motivated Sydney church stabbing for its global users.
The case was ultimately dropped, but commissioner Julie Inman Grant says she received an “avalanche of online abuse” after Mr Musk called her the “censorship commissar” in a post to his 196 million followers.
[…]
A Columbia University report into technology-facilitated gender-based violence - which used Ms Inman Grant as a case study - found that she had been mentioned in almost 74,000 posts on X ahead of the court proceedings, despite being a relatively unknown figure online beforehand.
According to the analysis, the majority of the messages were either negative, hateful or threatening in some way. Dehumanising slurs and gendered language were also frequently noted, with users calling Ms Inman Grant names such as “left-wing Barbie”, or “captain tampon”.
[…]
Ms Inman Grant said that Mr Musk’s decision to use “disinformation” to suggest that she was “trying to globally censor the internet” had amounted to a “dog whistle from a very powerful tech billionaire who owns his own megaphone”.
She said that the torrent of online vitriol which followed had prompted Australian police to warn her against travelling to the US, and that the names of her children and other family members had been released across the internet.
[…]
The case turned into a test of Australia’s ability to enforce its online rules against social media giants operating in multiple jurisdictions – one which failed after a Federal Court judge found that banning the posts from appearing on X globally would not be “reasonable” as it would likely be “ignored or disparaged by other countries”.
In June, Ms Inman Grant’s office said it would not pursue the case further, and that it would focus on other pending litigation against the platform.
X’s Global Government Affairs team described the outcome as a win for “freedom of speech”.
On one hand, the hate that’s being directed to the e-Safety commish is disgraceful.
On the other hand she is effectively proposing an internet licence for all Australians to be able to interact online via mandatory age verification. It applies to all social media sites but the definition of social media is so vague it basically just says a digital service which can be used to communicate with other people. She is deserving of our scrutiny.
Such regulation would significantly harm small sites which get dragged into this making fediverse instances in Australia untenable, meaning only the large platforms have the resources to comply. The internet is dangerous, yes. But the internet is also good. The internet provides information, and in a democracy nothing should be done to limit the flow of information.
Yeah 100% agree. I put in a submission to the joint select committee on social media a while back saying as much. The concept has Meta, X, Microsoft, Google and the big players in mind. Even if it is just the big players it’ll have unintended consequences, privacy being the main one. Digital ID providers, public or private, not using standards and only supporting Google Play and Apple App Store is a big issue.
I personally don’t care about the concept of the eSafety Commissioner that much. I think the idea of a government body that looks at cyberbullying cases is possibly misguided (way too high up) but I’m not overly concerned with that aspect. Julie Inman Grant is ex-Microsoft and ex-Adobe, two organisations which are pretty hostile to users’ rights. She is constantly requesting more powers to solve an unsolvable problem. There are massive problems with X and Meta, but some of the solutions she puts forward are just draconian like mandatory ID and client-side scanning. Their strategy page is a thinly veiled pro-big tech piece talking about concerns about potential lack of authority in decentralised computing.
Yeah, eKaren is really not far off the mark as far as name calling goes.
