Calls are growing for Australia’s chief online censor to be fired for political bias after attacking former US president Donald Trump in a speech.
Australia’s American-born eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, addressed the Royal Society of NSW at a dinner at Government House in Sydney on Thursday where she ranted about Mr Trump and Robert Kennedy Jnr while pushing for harsher government censorship of the internet.
“During his presidency Donald Trump not only savagely abused foes online with impunity, but was identified as a major super-spreader of mis and disinformation,” said Ms Inman Grant, an unelected bureaucrat on a taxpayer-funded salary of more than $445,000 a year.
“However, his online audience was so sizable, and his content went so viral, that none of the major platforms suspended him for repeated policy violations, making excuses for vaguely worded ‘exceptions for public figures’.
“A 2021 analysis of 120,000 posts and tweets on Facebook and Twitter found that there was just a small collection of only 12 individuals and their organisations responsible for the vast majority of anti-vax Covid misinformation circulating on the global internet during the lockdown.
“Whilst Donald Trump could not claim the dubious distinction of being named one of the ‘disinformation dozen’, another US presidential candidate, Robert Kennedy Jnr, is amongst them.”
United Australia Party Senator Ralph Babet on Monday called for the Labor government to remove Ms Inman grant from her role, which he said she was “wholly unfit to occupy”.
Media release: The Prime Minister must sack the eSafety Commissioner. pic.twitter.com/KcP0Xr2hJE
— Senator Babet (@senatorbabet) July 21, 2024
“The Commissioner is plainly partisan in a role that demands impartiality,” Senator Babet said.
“That Inman Grant describes the former president and current Republican nominee in such terms, just months before he is likely elected as the leader of a major ally and our most important security partner, is not only unacceptable but also completely against the national interest.
“Julie Inman Grant must be immediately removed from her role and replaced with someone who can be trusted to fulfil the duties of the position in an impartial manner rather than to use it as a platform for personal editorialising and political smearing.”
Former Queensland Premier Campbell Newman, now a spokesperson for the Libertarian Party, called for Opposition leader Peter Dutton to withdraw Coalition support for Ms Inman Grant.
“She clearly believes that it’s OK for her agency to censor the political views of people,” he said on X on Sunday.
“We don’t want an Australia where an unelected (and clearly out of control) individual is hell bent on suppressing political debate.
“It’s time to stop this.”
The Free Speech Union of Australia shared a video clip from the event captioned: “Here’s Australia’s eSafety Commissioner again discussing her desire to control the flow of information over the entire internet – the arrogance of this woman thinking she knows what is misinformation and people shouldn’t get to make up their own mind.”
Ms Inman Grant’s speech comes just weeks after she was caught spreading misinformation herself 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.
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.
