Australia’s censorship commissar caught spreading misinformation about ‘violent extremism’ and racist online abuse

Australia’s controversial online censorship boss has been caught spreading
misinformation about White nationalist ‘violent extremism’ and online abuse
targeting aboriginals.

Ahead of last year’s referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, which
was emphatically rejected by the Australian public, eSafety Commissioner
Julie Inman Grant warned of a likely increase in “online hate” directed at
indigenous people.

But data obtained under freedom of information (FOI) requests by the
Institute of Public Affairs has found that there were just two complaints
made by indigenous people relating to online abuse linked to the Voice
referendum, and that the eSafety office did not issue a single takedown
notice as a result.

“Australians simply cannot trust the eSafety Commissioner to stick to
online child protection, due to a history of politically charged
censorship, as evidenced by the eSafety Commission’s own data,” said John
Storey, Director of Law and Policy at the Institute of Public Affairs.

“The narrative Julie Inman Grant has sort to establish, that there was a
wave of racist cyber abuse during the referendum, is not supported by her
own office’s data.

“The fact that there were just two Voice-related complaints during the
middle of a highly divisive national debate, when nearly one million
Australians identify as indigenous, shows that there was little material
substance to the eSafety Commissioner’s claims.”

According to the FOI data, from July 1 to September 30, 2023, the last full
quarter before the referendum, there were 30 complaints in total made by
indigenous Australians about cyber abuse, or just 0.4% of all complaints
made to the eSafety Commissioner during that period.

“The eSafety Commissioner has demanded that social media companies censor
the internet worldwide based on subjective and vague powers, which has
allowed for dramatic overreach beyond focussed interventions on protecting
children,” Mr Storey said.

“There is clearly a need for public policy to protect children from obscene
and violent content, and for law enforcement purposes, but now the eSafety
Commissioner has powers which enable the censorship of debate and opinion.”

“All Australians have the right to freedom of speech online. Governments
and activist bureaucrats must never be given a platform to launch
politically motivated interventions.”

Mr Storey on Saturday wrote in an article for Sky News Australia that Ms
Inman Grant appeared to have a record of “distorting facts to suit her
agenda” and a “oppressor and oppressed” narrative popular in the political
establishment and academia.

He pointed out that less than a month before an alleged Muslim terrorist
attack on Bishop Mar Mari in Sydney, Ms Inman Grant issued a media release
about forcing tech companies to tackle “terror and violent extremism”.

“You might think that the eSafety Commissioner was highly prescient about
the looming risk of terrorism, issuing her warning weeks before one of
Australia’s most prominent and allegedly religiously motivated terror
attacks. But you would be wrong,” he wrote.

“The eSafety Commissioner’s media release did not warn about religiously
motivated violence. There was no mention of rising community tensions
caused by the war in Gaza, rising anti-Semitism on university campuses or
rising risks of violence due to regular pro-Palestine demonstrations.

“Instead, the eSafety Commissioner chose to warn about ‘White
nationalism’.”

Mr Storey added that rather than highlight any of the thousands of attacks
carried out by Islamic extremists overseas or actual examples of Muslim
terrorism in Australia, Ms Inman Grant instead highlighted three overseas
incidents caused by “White supremacist extremism”.

“If the social media companies took her warning literally, they would have
devoted efforts to seeking out and clamping down on right-wing or White
nationalist extremists online,” he wrote.

“One wonders if perhaps resources and attention were diverted from what was
always the most likely source of such an attack.”

Mr Storey said that he had similar concerns about the eSafety
Commissioner’s comments about online abuse during the Voice referendum.

“By falsely suggesting Indigenous Australians were under siege from online
abuse, in the middle of a contentious and divisive political debate, she
may have exacerbated community tensions,” he said.

The IPA report found that Ms Inman Grant’s Voice abuse comments still
inform the public debate on the issue, using two recent examples.

“In May 2024, during a panel discussion at the Sydney Writers’ festival,
ABC journalist Laura Tingle, referencing the Voice referendum,
controversially said that Australia is ‘a racist country, let’s face it. We
always have been, and it’s very depressing’,” the report states.

“Fellow ABC journalist Bridget Brennan agreed, saying that the No campaign
for the Voice was a ‘feral, nasty campaign’. Brennan also noted ‘there is
so much racism embedded in this country’, and that during the Voice debate
‘it was really horrible as an Aboriginal person’.”

The report found: “The eSafety Commissioner has ‘cried wolf’ on this issue.
The misleading claim of abuse against indigenous Australians during the
2023 referendum painted a false picture of the level of community
disharmony and thus were liable to unnecessarily increase community
tensions.

“The Australian community should be sceptical of the eSafety Commissioner’s
claims of looming online harm or that the exercise of censorship powers are
based on an objective, material, and real assessment of actual harm to the
community, and is more likely based on political considerations or raising
the profile of the eSafety Commissioner.”

Last month Ms Inman Grant admitted there was a conflict of interest when
her office acted on the request of a “transgender” extremist to demand X
remove a post about her made by a Canadian activist.

American-born unelected bureaucrat Ms Inman Grant, who makes $445,000 to
censor the internet on behalf of the Australian government, told a Senate
committee that she was overseas visiting her sick mother when the takedown
notice was filed, and that she did not know Ms Cook personally.

However, she did confirm that Ms Cook’s NSW government-funded “HIV and
LGBTQ+ health organisation” ACON had worked closely with her staff in the
past.

“He does run a peak LGBTQI+ body, and some on my team, in developing
materials, our learning lounge materials for the LGBTQI+ community, did
engage ACON and other organisations in developing those materials,” she
said, before quickly deferring the question to a colleague.

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