CANBERRA, Australia — Australia’s top censor, E-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, has slapped X.com with a fine of 610,500 Australian dollars (approximately $386,000) for violating the country’s new Online Safety Act.
The fine is reportedly the first instance of Inman Grant’s office penalizing an online platform over issues related to user-generated content. However, X is not the only company under scrutiny by Inman Grant.
Earlier this year, Inman Grant sent formal questions to several international online platforms demanding explanations as to “what they were doing to tackle a proliferation of child sexual exploitation, sexual extortion and the livestreaming of child sexual abuse,” the Associated Press reported Monday.
According to The Guardian, the tech companies, as well as gaming platforms Twitch and Discord, were given 35 days to respond to the commissioner’s questions or risk fines of up to $687,000 a day, legal demands which came six months after similar notices were issued to Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Snap and Omegle.
Inman Grant claimed that X and Google “did not comply with the notices, with Google giving generic responses to some specific questions, while some questions to X went entirely unanswered,” The Guardian reported Monday.
“I think there’s a degree of defiance there,” Inman Grant told the AP as justification for the six-figure fine to X.com. She cited the company’s refusal to answer questions about how many staffers remained on its trust and safety team since Elon Musk purchased the company in 2022.
Google has been given a formal warning, while X was given an infringement notice and now has 28 days to either pay the fine or provide responses to all her questions.
An Anti-Porn Bureaucrat With Broad Oversight Powers
As XBIZ reported, the vocally anti-porn Inman Grant was appointed by the former conservative government of Australia. She has acknowledged having conversations with U.S.-based, religiously-inspired lobby NCOSE and even appeared on an NCOSE podcast at the Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation summit in July 2021, shortly after the Australian Parliament passed the country’s Online Safety Act.
Before moving to Australia, Inman Grant received degrees from Boston University and American University, worked in politics in Washington D.C. and then for tech giants Microsoft, Twitter and Adobe. According to her official bio, she now claims to “lead the world’s first government regulatory agency committed to keeping its citizens safer online.” She was reappointed for a further five-year term by the Australian government in January 2022.
Inman Grant submitted her road map for imposing age verification requirements on “online pornographic sites” back in March, but in August, the liberal-leaning Australian government announced that it will not require adult websites to implement age verification, one of Inman Grant’s main objectives. According to a report by The Guardian, the decision was made due to “concerns about privacy and the lack of maturity of the technology.”
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland’s response to the document instead instructed Inman Grant “to work with the industry to develop a new code to educate parents on how to access filtering software and limit children’s access to such material or sites that are not appropriate,” the Guardian reported in August.
Main Image: Australia's top online censor, E-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant