Australia's online regulator got death threats for case against X
www.bbc.com
Australia's internet watchdog says she received a torrent of abuse after being personally named by Elon Musk.

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”.

  • fine_sandy_bottom@lemmy.federate.cc
    13·
    2 months ago

    I’m quite conflicted about this.

    I hate musk. Hate twitter. Hate that people were sharing videos of a terrorist attack.

    That said, I suspect that this was something of a test case, with the regulator flexing their censorship muscle, and I’m glad it didn’t work out.

    It’s also disappointing that her kids were doxxed, I don’t condone that at all… but “just doing my job” is not a reasonable defence when you have a shitty job strategising how to corrode privacy.

    • astro_ray@piefed.social
      20·
      2 months ago

      The stabbing was literally live streamed and they were trying to block a very graphic footage to be viral on Twitter. I would have blocked the instance if any fediverse instance didn’t remove such a video from their platform.

      • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
        2·
        2 months ago

        And that’d be reasonable for you to do. However, having a network choose to remove something, or cut ties with servers in the network that don’t in an attempt to persuade them to remove that thing, isn’t exactly the same as a government ordering a thing be removed. The former doesn’t give much avenue for a malicious actor to suppress something that isn’t in their interest, because they can hardly control the collective actions of users on the network, but the latter does by creating a single point of decision making on the network’s content from the outside. Not that the motivations in wanting that video gone were bad, but there is an element of risk to making it possible for a government entity to remove something from a social network, even if the thing they want gone this time is something that really shouldn’t be there.

    • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.ee
      4·
      2 months ago

      I suspect that this was something of a test case, with the regulator flexing their censorship muscle, and I’m glad it didn’t work out.

      This was a POV stabbing video that people spread around to glorify violence. It’s in the same category as beheading videos.

      America may have decided that child porn is the only media exception to free speech, but other more sane countries draw the line a little bit more broadly to include all forms of extremely violent crime filmed to be glorified, including things like murder, attempted murder, torture, and the rape of adults.

      If you want to operate a business in places like Australia or New Zealand, you cannot be distributing violent gore videos within their borders.

      I hope they revisit this as X users are pretty routinely celebrating things like the Christchurch shooting and other violent extremist incidents. Sometimes censorship makes sense, and when people are antagonistically spreading videos of people being maimed and killed, the “free speech” argument absolutely doesn’t fucking cut it.