Australian Official Received Death Threats After Musk Criticism

The head of Australia’s digital safety agency said she received death threats and that her family’s identities were published after Elon Musk derided her for trying to regulate his social media platform X earlier this year.

eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant said she was “emboldened” by such threats but called them “not just mean words”.

Earlier this year the commission accused X, formerly Twitter, of overruling Australian law by refusing to remove violent content related to an attack in an Assyrian Orthodox church in April.

X was alone amongst social media companies in fighting a takedown order involving 65 posts showing video of a knife attack in which a bishop and a priest were injured.

Violent content

Other platforms, such as Facebook parent Meta Platforms, took down the content quickly when asked, while X instead geoblocked Australians from seeing the posts, while leaving them online elsewhere.

Inman Grant told ABC Radio that after Musk called her the “censorship commisar” to his 196 million X followers she began receiving “tens of thousands” of threats directed at her and her children.

Within 48 hours of asking social media companies to take down the footage her personal information was published and her family members identified, she said.

“There were some credible death threats. Specifically, ‘If you don’t step down from your job in the next three days, we will do x, y and z to you, and we know where you live’,” Inman Grant said.

She was advised by security services not to go to the US because she could not be adequately protected there.

“This actually emboldens me. We know exactly what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to drive me from the online world. They’re trying to drive me from public spaces. We have a very broken polarised online environment and we need to keep fighting,” she said.

Tech-facilitated violence

Inman Grant featured as a case study in a Columbia University report on Friday into technology-facilitated gender-based violence, which found she had been mentioned in nearly 74,000 posts on X ahead of court proceedings against the platform, most of which were negative, hateful or threatening.

She told the BBC Musk’s use of “disinformation” to suggest she was “trying to globally censor the internet” amounted to a “dog whistle from a very powerful tech billionaire who owns his own megaphone”.

The commission dropped the case in June, preferring to focus on other pending litigation against X.

The government criticised X and other social media platforms last month over their role in spreading hate speech amidst riots in the UK.