Julie Inman Grant, the eSafety Commissioner (wannabe Internet Censor in Chief, “wannabe” because she has fairly limited scope and powers to do much), is at the Davos talkfest of our betters planning out what kind of miserable future our children will have, and this typically bureaucratese and mealy mouthed snippet got a lot of play:
Australian eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant tells the World Economic Forum we need a "recalibration" of freedom of speech. pic.twitter.com/zEq72wFhNf
— Andrew Lawton (@AndrewLawton) May 23, 2022
She said:
We are finding ourselves in a place where we have increasing polarization everywhere, and everything feels binary when it doesn’t need to be – so I think we’re going to have to think about a recalibration of a whole range of human rights that are playing out online – from freedom of speech, to be free from online violence. Or the right of data protection, to the right of child dignity
“Recalibrating” freedom of speech means “censor more stuff (by white people, especially men)”.
Last week she tried doing some of this “recalibrating” to the American website Kiwi Farms by, rather improbably, threatening them with fines for hosting written and video materials of the unfortunately named Payton Gendron, who shot some random people in Buffalo, New York, recently.
The email, titled “2022-05-18 – Government of Australia: URGENT class 1 removal notice from the eSafety Commissioner [SEC=OFFICIAL:Sensitive]” contents:
Hard to know what is going in this dog brain’s head if she thinks Australian laws apply to foreigners who are doing nothing illegal in their own country.
The rather subdued, possibly weary, response of the Kiwi Farms owner:
Hello,
The Kiwi Farms is an American company. The United States has laws protecting freedom of speech and the distribution of information.
Thank you for your understanding,
Joshua Moon
Managing Member
Lolcow LLC
It’s subdued in comparison to this, regarding the hosting of another mass shooter’s manifesto and video stream, Brenton Tarrant’s, after New Zealand police in 2019 asked for the IP addresses of people who had accessed the materials on Kiwi Farms:
Is this a joke? I’m not turning over information about my users. The person responsible for posting the video and manifesto PDF is myself.
I feel real bad for you guys, you’ve got a quiet nation and now this attack is going to be the first thing people think of for the next 10 years when they hear the name New Zealand, but you can’t do this.
Tell your superiors they’re going to make the entire country and its government look like clowns by trying to censor the Internet. You’re a small, irrelevant island nation barely more recognizable than any other nameless pacific sovereignty.
You do not have the clout to eradicate a video from the Internet and you do not have the legal reach to imprison everyone who’s posted it. If anyone turns over to you the information they’re asking for they’re not only cowards, but they’re f***ing idiots.
Funny stuff.
Theoretically Inman can get ISPs to block websites that ignore takedown notices like these but I’ve read different things about this and it’s likely not a simple thing to do and in any case it hasn’t happened yet. There has also been zero convictions or fines given under these new laws so far.
Anyway, from the video of her talking, Inman has a bland kind of American accent, probably north eastern, but I don’t know where she is from exactly as she mysteriously doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, but does have a WikiSpooks page, and is early 50s, married with three children, and she studycunted at Boston University, busyworked at the US Congress briefly, then worked for Microsoft a long time, and ended up heading their Australian division, and just refused to go home to America, so we’re stuck with her, like that other odious American woman, Kristina Keneally (who managed to lose a very safe Labor seat at the just gone election).
The obvious comparison here is with her compatriot and abortive US Disinformation Board boss Nina J, but at least Inman doesn’t sing at us and she’s not totally oozing malevolence like Shovelface here:
On the other hand Scary Poppins lost her job before she even started it, we still have Julia out there, watching, caring, desperate to start recalibrating stuff.
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