A new front has opened in the ongoing battle between Elon Musk’s X Corp. and Australia’s internet regulator, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant.
The Australian Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) is to rule on whether eSafety was justified in ordering X to block a post by Canadian activist Chris Elston, who goes by the pseudonym “Billboard Chris.”
The former financial advisor, from Vancouver, has more than 400,000 followers on the platform.
Mr. Elston’s X post showed a screenshot of a Daily Mail story published in late February, about Teddy Cook, an Australian female-to-male trans activist who was appointed to a World Health Organisation (WHO) expert panel to draft guidelines for the care of trans and non-binary people.
In his post, Mr. Elston misgendered Mr. Cook and made other allegedly “disparaging” remarks.
On March 22, Mr. Elston received a letter from an unnamed person in the office of the eSafety commissioner, demanding he remove the “deliberately degrading” post, characterising it as “cyber-abuse material targeted at an Australian adult.
“An ordinary reasonable person in the position of the complainant would regard the material as being offensive,” the letter said, which was posted by Mr. Elston on his account.
“This is because the material singles out the complainant to personify the poster’s contempt for transgender identity as well as equating transgender identity with a psychiatric condition.”
It’s not known whether Mr. Cook lodged the complaint himself.
The transgender activist was also drafted by the eSafety commissioner in 2022 to advise on the production of resources “to help the LGBTIQ+ community safely navigate the online world,” and featured alongside Ms. Inman Grant in press releases.
X Corp. was also served with an order demanding the post be removed within 24 hours, or face a fine of up to $782,500 (about US$515,000).
It is still visible to people in other parts of the world and to anyone in Australia using a VPN.
Further, the social media company is pursuing action against the commissioner in the Federal Court of Australia, while Mr. Elston—represented by the Free Speech Union of Australia—is appealing the decision in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, which he revealed in another post.
Mr. Elston, currently in Australia as part of his campaign, admitted, “(It was) not my nicest tweet ever, but technically accurate.”
“How do you have some unelected bureaucrat determining, unilaterally, what is acceptable speech or not?” he asked. “The line that we cross should be incitement to violence. Criticism, especially of a public official, should not be reason to take something down, and when you read the eSafety legislation itself, hurt feelings are not cause for taking down tweets.”
The office of the eSafety commissioner has yet to respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times.
