From Watts Up With That?
Essay by Eric Worrall
h/t observa; “… the online watchdog “considered this option (abandoning legal action) likely to achieve the most positive outcome for the online safety of all Australians, especially children”. …”
‘Dog whistle’: Regulator accuses Musk
Story by Nathan Schmidt
Australia’s eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant says she was subjected to death threats after taking up the fight against social media platform X and its owner Elon Musk.
“He issued a dog whistle to 181 million users around the globe which resulted in death threats directly to me and which resulted in doxxing of my family members, including my three children,” Ms Inman Grant told the ABC.
“With great power comes great responsibility and exercising that restraint in terms of targeting a regulator who is here to protect the citizens of Australia is really beyond the pale.
“But it is not surprising. This is his modus operandi. I will not be cowered but those threats.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Ms Inman Grant announced she had dropped the legal fight against X over its refusal to remove videos depicting a stabbing attack against a Sydney bishop.
The eSafety Commission was attempting to force X to remove videos of footage of an alleged terror attack in which Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was stabbed during a live-streamed sermon.
…
Ms Grant said the online watchdog “considered this option (abandoning legal action) likely to achieve the most positive outcome for the online safety of all Australians, especially children”.
…Read more:
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/elon-musk-s-big-win-over-australia/ar-BB1nDVNT
What a whiner. At least President Biden’s choice for Ministry of Truth czar Nina Jankowicz was entertaining.
Thank you again Elon Musk for standing up to this outrageous attack on global freedom of speech.
And just to show there are no hard feelings Aussie eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant, if you ever publish a whacky Mary Poppins disinformation singalong like former US Disinformation Governance Board head Nina Jankowicz, you can be assured WUWT will publish it.
Update (EW): A lot is happening in the global digital censorship space. The United Nations is pushing hard to purge online platforms of narratives they consider disinformation. Australia is arguably the Western leader of the current censorship push, with threats to impose a digital ID on Aussie citizens, and a push to develop a Chinese style firewall around all Australian internet access. Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern appears to be a major player in the digital censorship push – in 2022 Ardern made a wild speech which apparently attempted to link uncensored climate skepticism to mass shooting atrocities. Ardern currently has two concurrent fellowships at Harvard related to online disinformation, which in my opinion implies significant US academic interest in restricting online freedom.
My point is, it is funny to laugh at the serial frustrations of wannabe online censors, but watching them fail and complain is only funny so long as they keep failing to curtail our freedoms. Even the USA isn’t immune from these attacks on freedom – in my opinion, the significant US academic participation in the online censorship push, as personified by Ardern’s dual Harvard fellowships, is a warning of the scale of the attack.
If online content is captured by vested interests to the extent I believe establishment media has been captured, the age of free speech will be at an end, regardless of constitutional guarantees of free speech. As President Obama said in 2022, “The first amendment does not apply to … facebook and twitter”. A voluntary cartel of internet service providers, engineered by putting the “right” people in charge of all these organisations, would be just as effective at curtailing our freedom as tearing up the First Amendment, without the embarrassment of an obvious violation of the US Constitution.