X owner Elon Musk should be thrown in prison, said a senator in Australia yesterday, because he refuses to delete a video of a recent stabbing from X globally. “Whatever Elon Musk is on,” said Senator Jacqui Lambie, “it’s disgusting behavior. Quite frankly, the bloke should be jailed.”
But what’s truly disgusting behavior is calling for the incarceration of someone for refusing to censor the entire global Internet on behalf of a single nation. It is not the right of any nation to decide what should be on the Internet around the world. “No president, prime minister, or judge,” responded Musk on X, “has authority over all of Earth!” He’s right.
It’s true that violent content online can be disturbing. I think platforms should put warning labels on them and find some way to prevent minors from seeing it. I also think there are real privacy concerns that should be addressed.
But violence is not the only thing the Australian government has told X to remove. It has also targeted political speech. And nothing can justify the Australian government censoring the entire global Internet of content it does not like.
Many of us, myself included, have long suspected that government censors in Ireland, Scotland, and the European Union would attempt to censor the whole of the Internet, not just in their own countries. With Brazil and now Australia demanding the power to censor the whole internet, it’s clear that our fears were more than justified.
And now, Public has learned that there is a formal government censorship network called the “Global Online Safety Regulators Network,” which Australia’s top Internet censor, Julie Inman Grant, who is an American, described at World Economic Forum. The group includes censors from Australia, France, Ireland, South Africa, Korea, the UK, and Fiji.
But before getting to that, it’s first important to understand just how powerful she is. Here is Julie Inman Grant, boasting of her extraordinary censorship powers. “Yes, we do regulate the platforms. We have a big stick that we can use when we want to….They’re going to be regulated in ways that they don't want to be regulated.”
In a different video, Inman Grant said, “We also have some pretty significant ISP blocking powers. We just had some new powers given to us… in addition to be able to compel that takedown, to be able to fine perpetrators as a deterrent effect, and fine content hosts that don't take down this content, um, we can, um, We also have something in this new legislation called the basic online safety expectations.”
She goes on to say that she is already working with Ireland, the UK, France, and other governments around the world.
“We use the tools that we have, and we can be effective, but we know we're going to be, go much further, um, when we work together with other like-minded independent statutory authorities around the globe…with the U. K. With Ireland and with Fiji in November 2022, we launched the global online safety regulators network that has now grown to seven independent regulators, including France, South Korea, South Africa and a number of countries are serving as observers.”
At the World Economic Forum, Inman Grant said she had launched a global censorship body called “the Global Online Safety Regulators Network” to unify governments around censorship “So that we could have a form to help us coordinate, build capacity and do just that. But also make sure that what we're going to have differences in our regulatory schemes, there would be common values that drive us together.”
This global censorship body gives governments extraordinary power to invade privacy, explained Inman-Grant. “What this legislation will give us is the ability to compel basic device information and account information. And more and more and more social media companies are starting to collect phone numbers and email addresses so that our investigators can at least find a place to issue a notice or a takedown notice or infringement notice of some sort.”
Inman Grant may be working with other governments to create identity requirements and to stamp out Virtual Private Networks, which millions of people in China and other totalitarian societies use to access the free Internet. “You can use VPNs, you can use burner phones,” she said, “different SIM cards every day. So it's going to be a challenge for a long time because, again, the internet's global. If there is no such thing as a kind of global identity system or even a piece of identity everybody can agree with, you know, should we all be sharing our driver's license or our passports?”
At that same World Economic Forum meeting, one of the European Union’s top censors, Věra Jourová, calls for censorship to avoid events like January 6, and to fight hate speech.
“The same thing, uh, reaction on the 6th of January, 2020. So, in Europe, of course, we have our history. We had to take action against hate speech. Because what it is, anti-Semitism, racism, LGBT, the menu is always the same.”
Jourva explains that the EU and Australia intend to pressure social media companies to implement global censorship to simplify things.
Who is Jourova? Why she’s the same person that Public caught spreading disinformation about a new Russiagate hoax two weeks ago.
Who is Inman Grant?
