Australia’s ‘eSafety’ chief wants to censor the whole world

‘Is it time to cut “Big Tech” down to size?’, asked the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship-current affairs programme, Q&A, earlier this week. The focus, as you probably will have guessed, was Elon Musk’s X, known for its more laissez-faire attitude to content moderation than the other tech giants. The answer, from the predictably unbalanced panel, was a clear and resounding ‘yes’.

Leading the charge against free speech was Julie Inman-Grant, Australia’s ‘eSafety commissioner’. A smooth-talking American with a background in Silicon Valley, she was first appointed as Australia’s chief internet censor in 2017. She reached global notoriety in April 2024 when she decided to take X to court under Australia’s Online Safety Act over a video of a non-fatal stabbing of a Christian bishop in Sydney. Inman-Grant argued that its continued circulation risked inciting more violence. X agreed to block access to the video in Australia, but the eSafety commissioner wanted it to be censored worldwide. This absurd request was thankfully dropped less than two months later.

If this week’s Q&A was anything to go by, Musk has been living rent free in Inman-Grant’s head ever since. She falsely accused Musk of seeking to ‘incite’ a civil war in the UK and of calling for people to rise up against the government, amid the riots after the Southport stabbings (Musk had actually said that ‘civil war is inevitable’). She also accused Musk of – horror of horrors – ‘insulting the [British] prime minister’ and of promulgating ‘hate’ and ‘disinformation’.

When Inman-Grant was asked by a member of the audience whether she believes there should be free speech online, she replied: ‘Of course we embrace freedom of expression.’ She then immediately began reeling off a list of occasions where free expression supposedly needs to be curtailed. In particular, speech that ‘veers into the lane of online harm’ cannot stand, she said. Who gets to decide what speech causes ‘online harm’? None other than the eSafety commissioner herself, of course.

Inman-Grant insisted her job is not about ‘micromanaging content, it’s harms remediation’. But her track record says otherwise. Earlier this year, the eSafety commissioner tried to remove a post on X by Canadian national Chris Elston – known as ‘Billboard Chris’ – which linked to a Daily Mail article about an Australian trans activist. The article revealed that Teddy Cook, who had been appointed to a World Health Organisation expert panel drafting care guidelines for trans and nonbinary people, had posted lewd images of herself and a picture of a man apparently having sex with a dog on social media. Inman-Grant ordered X to remove the post in 24 hours – or face a fine of nearly 800,000 Australian dollars. Her reasoning? Because the post ‘misgenders’ Woods and is thus ‘likely to cause serious harm’.

Inman-Grant’s row with Musk over the Sydney stabbing video and the attempts to censor the Billboard Chris post exposed a worrying pattern. Clearly, she is not satisfied with merely regulating the online speech of Australians, which would be bad enough. No, she clearly believes she should have the power to regulate the internet use of people across the whole world.

No Australian has ever voted for Inman-Grant. No one really knows how she has become the head of an opaque bureaucracy comprising nearly 500 staff. No one knows why she should get to decide what speech is ‘harmful’ and therefore forbidden, not only in Australia but apparently internationally, too.

Despite all this, Inman-Grant’s censorious views went essentially unchallenged by the Q&A panel. The solitary free-speech heretic, Josh Szeps, had his work cut out for him from the start. The elite consensus is clearly overwhelmingly for censorship.

The slow death of free speech Down Under is not just terrible news for Australians. With the eSafety commissioners’ global designs, the rest of the world ought to be alarmed, too.

Hugo Timms is an intern at spiked.