‘Unelected bureaucrat’: e-Safety commissioner unleashes on Elon Musk
Australia’s e-Safety commissioner has unleashed on billionaire and social media platform owner Elon Musk at a tech industry event at Parliament House.
Julie Inman-Grant jokingly introduced herself to the crowd as the “censorship commissar”, a label derisively given to her by Mr Musk, saying she was also known online as “e-Karen and e-Slut”.
The commissioner has previously revealed her attempts to have footage of a violent terror incident removed from Mr Musk’s platform, X, has led to death threats levelled at her and her family.
She told the Tech Policy Institute event it had been challenging, “particularly when the largest megaphone in history is shooting unrelenting waves of vitriol at you”.
But Ms Inman-Grant made her own jab at the newly installed head of US President Donald Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency”, riffing off Mr Musk’s taunt that she was an “unelected bureaucrat”.
“Look who is the unelected American bureaucrat now”, she said to a laughing crowd.
The e-Safety commission was ultimately forced to drop its legal case against X to have footage of the Wakeley church stabbing removed globally.
Ms Inman-Grant said the trial had not been helped by the lack of a general counsel or other appropriate resourcing.
She became emotional as she mentioned that the footage purportedly “inspired” an attack in the United Kingdom, where a teenager allegedly watched the stabbing video before going on to murder three young girls during a dance class.
The federal government and opposition have sought to avoid upsetting the Trump administration in the hopes of achieving a carve out from planned tariffs on steel and aluminium, as well as to secure the support of the AUKUS nuclear submarine scheme.
However Opposition Leader Peter Dutton told Insiders earlier this month that he had spent a decade battling “against people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and others who are making money out of our kids, and they need to do it in a responsible way”.
“If there is terrorist-related advocacy and spreading of that hate message, they have the algorithms, they have the technology and now the AI to be able to clear it, but of course they don’t because they’re driven by profit.
“So yes, of course it should be taken down.”
