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Flat White

Musk vs Australia’s ‘you can’t say that’ surveillance state

6 April 2024

4:06 PM

6 April 2024

4:06 PM

Australia’s Labor/Green ‘you can’t say that’ surveillance state is being challenged by Elon Musk in a lawsuit over bureaucratic bullying.

Musk’s team will challenge Labor e-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant’s demand to remove a post featuring a Daily Mail article.

The original tweet linked concerns about an LGBTQ+ activist with an overall critique of transgenderism.

Quipping that the inmates are running the asylum was apparently a step too far.

The Twitter user voiced concerns about an LGBTQ+ activist being referred to as an expert advising the United Nations on health policies.

As The Post Millennial recalled, the trans-identifying biological male is known for posting graphic LGBTQ+ content online.

Ignoring the alleged behaviour of the activist online, the Australian government instead went after the Twitter user, labelling their concerns, ‘deliberately degrading’.

A big part of the heat seems to be that the Twitter user – who is not an Australian citizen but a Canadian – is refusing to obey an order from the Australian government to delete the tweet.

That tweet, now blocked for Australian users, read:

Acting on the complaint in late March, the e-Safety Department told Twitter to remove the ‘harmful’ post, citing Section 88 of the Online Safety Act 2021.

Failure to comply would have landed Musk with an AUD 782,500 fine.


Consequently, Twitter said it was, ‘…withholding the post in Australia in compliance with the order but intends to file a legal challenge to the order to protect its user’s right to free speech.’

Australia’s e-Safety Commission is regarded as the ‘world’s first regulatory agency committed to keeping its citizens safe online’.

Agency head, Julie Inman Grant, was employed by Twitter for approximately two years prior to Musk buying the platform.

Notably, in November 2022, she expressed apprehensions about Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.

Specifically, the ex-Twitter and current e-Safety Commissioner wanted to know if Musk would ‘continue’ to enforce ‘Australian laws, by responding to regulatory requests, and maintaining escalation paths’.

We are left to wonder if this includes continuing the habit of censoring accounts the Australian government considers ‘problematic’.

If you have sensed a whiff of Woke hypocrisy. You’d be right.

Part of the e-Safety agency’s role is countering cyber bullying. This includes ‘coercive control’.

Labor’s E-safety Ministry (of forced speech) defines coercive control as, ‘…a pattern of abusive behaviour used to control someone within a relationship through manipulation, pressure, and fear.’

Further, an abuser ‘can use technology, or stop another person using it, as a “weapon” to gain and keep control over them’.

Relationship and pattern are easily recognised.

State overreach on free speech, and its burden on the citizen-state relationship, are well-established facts.

In the United States it was proven via the Twitter Files that the Democrats used Big Tech to censor political opponents.

Who polices the ‘you can’t say that’ surveillance state?

Surely, cyber bullying laws includes protecting citizens from the state?

As I argued in July last year, if an E-Safety department has to exist, it should only be concerned with:

  1. Protecting children online from sex predators.
  2. Stopping online scams.
  3. Restraining provable foreign enemy psyops and disinformation.
  4. Protecting free and fair elections, as well as freedom of speech.
  5. Keeping Governments accountable.

Operating outside these parameters negates its reason for existence.

This fight between Twitter and the Socialist surveillance state isn’t just a fight for one Twitter user and their freedom of speech, it’s a fight for a free, and fair Australia.

I don’t think many would, or could, write this off as an exaggeration.

Only bullies would demand everyone ‘go along to get along’ and silence those who refused to look the other way.


This article was first published in Caldron Pool.

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