Australia's eSaftey Commissioner gives the censorship game away on Q+A
Amid bipartisan calls to tighten the screws on social media platforms in Australia, an appearance by the eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, on TV panel show Q+A accidentally gave the game away.
A panel of experts convened in front of a live studio audience to discuss new YouGov polling commissioned for Q+A which found that:
60% of Australians support a social media ban for youth under the age of 17,
80% support making social media platforms pay for licence to operate,
and 79% support a regulator with the power to order content removal.
(Subscribe to read more on these findings in a future post)
Answering an audience question about how eSafety would protect free speech on social media, Inman Grant emphasised that eSafety supports free expression, but only if it doesn’t cause harm.
The question is, outside of clear-cut illegal content such as child sex abuse content, what kind of content does Julie Inman Grant think is harmful?
The following exchange is the tell. Not illegal. Not even that awful, depending on your outlook. Just, content she disagrees with.
Julie Inman Grant: “Of course we embrace freedom of expression... but when it veers into the lane of online harm and it silences and suppresses the voices of others, then, somebody has to draw a line.
“We have complaint schemes that were designed by parliament. It’s not in terms of micromanaging content, it’s harms remediation.”
This position is hard to defend, especially in light of eSafety’s attempts get posts on culture war issues removed for ‘misgendering’ or saying men can’t breastfeed, and for her determined efforts to prevent Australians with VPNs from accessing the Wakeley stabbing footage, but not other violent news content. She’s out on the bailey, so watch for a retreat to the motte…
Julie Inman Grant: “So, children who are being maliciously cyber bullied, who report intimidating, harrassing, humiliating and horrible content to the platform and they don’t act, there’s a huge power imbalance there, and that child has no recourse.”
Protecting the children is the online safety advocate motte, the position that is easy to defend. No reasonable person would argue against this. Of course we want to protect children.
Julie Inman Grant: “So this is what the… parliament decided nine years ago, to start this up as a scheme. Now it applies to image-based abuse, so people who have intimate images and videos online, who come to us often after the police say ‘why don’t you just get off the internet and why did you take the picture in the first place,’ we have a 90% success rate in getting that down.
“The more quickly you get that down, the more emotional and mental distress is relieved. But that is balanced with process and systemic powers around transparency, around codes of conduct, around standards, and if we didn’t have that evidence base, we wouldn’t be as a effective in using our process powers.”
Ok, the police are not good at getting image-based abuse content removed, eSafety is good at it. We are still in the motte. Now, watch Inman Grant confidently stroll back out onto the bailey…
Julie Inman Grant: I’ll just point out one more thing. Because we have a broad set of tools that do both, we were able to take action when [the Wakeley stabbing] happened. If you contrast that with what just happened with the UK riots, where the Chief Twit was not only insulting the Prime Minister but was saying ‘civil war was inevitable’ and fomenting online hate and disinformation that was… already violent, they had no recourse because they didn’t have similar tools, they had to send an open letter rather than to send a formal removal notice.
Inman Grant’s facial expression here is very self-satisfied. ‘We could have gotten those offensive tweets removed. We could have stopped Elon Musk from insulting the PM, predicting a social uprising, and sharing incorrect information. But the UK couldn’t because their Online Safety Act (OSA) is not as good as ours.’
She’s out on the wide open bailey here, and panelist Josh Szeps is quick to point this out…
Josh Szeps: Wait a second, things like fomenting online hate, this is where you get into…You’re talking about litigating ideas, essentially. We’re not talking about incitement -
As previously discussed on this blog, the threshold for incitement is that a reasonable person would perceive the statement as a call to carry out a specific act of violence.
Julie Inman Grant: “That’s exactly what we’re talking about, it was incitement.”
Josh Szeps: “No, it was not incitement.”
Julie Inman Grant: “‘Civil war is inevitable’ and ‘people should rise up’ -”
Not only is this not incitement, it’s misinformation. Here, in the context of a discussion about Elon Musk’s tweets about the UK riots, Inman Grant appears to have dredged up a reference to a 2023 tweet about San Francisco’s governance problems. If Inman Grant truly believes mis- and disinformation should be removed from the internet, we can start by removing all copies of this Q+A episode for carrying this misleading statement.
Josh Szeps: “No, I don’t think it’s incitement.”
Host, Patricia Karvelas: “Because a lot of people don’t agree with you.”
Josh Szeps: “Absolutely, I mean there are a lot of people on the left in particular who seem to believe that they’ve got a monopoly on the truth and who feel quite unruffled about insisting that ideas they disagree with are beyond the pale.
“I would simply remind us all, that at every point in time in every place, the majority and the elite always think they’re right, by definition. They always think that ideas they disagree with are hateful, objectionable, contrary to the common good. In the 1950s arguing for communism was a crime.”
This is a very insightful comment considering that Inman Grant just misrepresented Musk’s tweets to advance her argument seconds ago, but seemed quite unaware of the error in her statement.
Patricia Karvelas: “So they’re ideas, but we’re talking about incitement.”
Josh Szeps: “No, if I post on Twitter, let’s meet in Federation Square at 3 o’clock and beat up some women and we do it, that’s incitement. But a lot of these - multiculturalism is an idea. The capacity of a democracy to absorb new cultures is an idea.”
Patricia Karvelas: “Well it’s actually a reality for multicultural communities, Josh - “
Josh Szeps: “It is an idea that will only be resolved through conversation, not through banning ideas.”
Touché.
Video via @Mickamious on X
What can we learn about our eSafety Commissioner from this exchange?
The bureaucrat at the helm of Australia’s online safety regulator does not appear to know the difference between legal and illegal speech,
She would like to censor (and potentially make illegal) ideas that she disagrees with,
She appears to be unaware of her own fallibility on certain issues,
And, this blind spot is bolstered by total self-confidence and self-righteousness about the correctness of her own views.
Troubling insights considering that Australia’s OSA is currently under statutory review, with a view to further expanding and strengthening eSafety’s powers.
This little episode is not a one-off, by the way. Inman Grant was caught out misleading the media when she said cyber abuse directed at indigenous Australians was ‘likely to intensify’ during the 2023 Voice referendum period and that the number of complaints made to eSafety was ‘highly concerning’. Data released under Freedom of Information (FOI) revealed that only eight more complaints than usual were made to eSafety relating to indigenous cyber abuse during this period, an increase that was roughly in line with the increase of complaints more generally.
Inman Grant’s seeming lack of her awareness of her blind spots, coupled with the fact that she spent a considerable amount of her speaking time on Q+A bellyaching about Elon Musk, is suggestive that Inman Grant has a barrow to push for either personal or ideological reasons, or both.
As head of the online safety regulator, Inman Grant oversees programs designed to protect children from cyber bullying and sexual abuse content, and to protect Australians of all ages against image based abuse and bullying. eSafety also has an educational component in its mission.
It’s all good, until we stray into authoritarianism under the guise of harm prevention.
But aren't authoritarians right wing white men with moustaches or questionable orange tan? This is a common misconception on the left, writes social scientist Luke Conway, who has made a study of authoritarianism on both sides of the political aisle.
In an article, ‘The Left Has an Authoritarian Problem (but Doesn’t Know It)’, Conway explains that authoritarianism rises as much from the authoritarian instincts of the people as from the chosen leader. ”Authoritarians don’t merely enforce reasonable rules or obey those rules—they want a strong leader to crush and silence their opponents,” he writes.
Opponents like Elon Musk, bigots who are worried about immigration policies, or wrong thinking mis-genderers.
Conway references research showing that those on the right tend to be aware of their own authoritarian instincts and fess up to it, but the inverse is true on the left. The more authoritarian a leftist, the more likely they are to deny their own authoritarianism. This, Conways says, is because leftists perceive anti-authoritarianism as core to their group identity, and so they reframe their own instincts to force their preferred norms on others in more palatable terms - say, ‘harm prevention.’
As far as Inman Grant’s politics are concerned, she is not publicly affiliated with one party or another, as is expected in her senior bureaucrat role. However, her public rhetoric and her targeting of particular viewpoints for regulatory action (and inaction on others) give a strong sense of where her ideological sympathies lie.
For all that we are incessantly warned in the media of the return of spirit of Hitler on the far right, the absence of warning bells for the authoritarian instinct on the left may present an equal or larger problem for Five Eyes nations in particular. Attractive, compassionate, Head Girl lefty types with a huge blind spot, and supported by a majority eager to empower her to crush ideas or norms they don’t like, can just as easily advance us down the path of authoritarianism as any strong man.
Watch the full Q + A episode here:
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An eSafety Commissioner who obviously considers herself very eSafe and eEffective. Also, I would trust YouGov polling almost as much as I would trust Big Harma clinical trial results. It seems to me they are used just as much to push public opinion in the direction of the agenda as they are to discover what the population actually thinks.
🙏yet child porn still exists on the web🤷♀️