‘These aren’t just words’: The woman threatened for taking X to court

Australia’s internet watchdog says she received “death threats” and that her children were doxxed after she was targeted by Elon Musk for attempting to regulate his social media platform.

Earlier this year, the eSafety commissioner took X to court over its refusal to remove videos of a religiously motivated Sydney church stabbing for its global users.

The case was ultimately dropped, but commissioner Julie Inman Grant says she received an “avalanche of online abuse” after Mr Musk called her the “censorship commissar” in a post to his 196 million followers.

X did not immediately respond for comment when contacted, and the BBC was unable to reach Mr Musk directly.

On Friday, a Columbia University report into technology-facilitated gender-based violence – which used Ms Inman Grant as a case study – found that she had been mentioned in almost 74,000 posts on X ahead of the court proceedings, despite being a relatively unknown figure online beforehand.

According to the analysis, the majority of the messages were either negative, hateful or threatening in some way. Dehumanising slurs and gendered language were also frequently noted, with users calling Ms Inman Grant names such as “left-wing Barbie”, or “captain tampon”.

Speaking to the BBC, Ms Inman Grant said that Mr Musk’s decision to use “disinformation” to suggest that she was “trying to globally censor the internet” had amounted to a “dog whistle from a very powerful tech billionaire who owns his own megaphone”.

She said that the torrent of online vitriol which followed had prompted Australian police to warn her against travelling to the US, and that the names of her children and other family members had been released across the internet, in a practice known as doxxing.

“There have been threats to my employees, my family, threats to my safety – including credible death threats. I’ve had to involve the federal and local police and change my movements,” she said.

“These aren’t just mean words where there’s a lack of resilience, these are threats of harm that can very easily spill over into real world violence.”

Australia’s independent internet regulator has a broad remit under local law to police content online that it deems to be violent or sexually exploitative.

And when X refused to take down videos of the Wakeley attack – opting instead to geoblock the content from its Australian users – the commissioner sought and won a court injunction, forcing the company to temporarily comply.

The case turned into a test of Australia’s ability to enforce its online rules against social media giants operating in multiple jurisdictions – one which failed after a Federal Court judge found that banning the posts from appearing on X globally would not be “reasonable” as it would likely be “ignored or disparaged by other countries”.

In June, Ms Inman Grant’s office said it would not pursue the case further, and that it would focus on other pending litigation against the platform.

X’s Global Government Affairs team described the outcome as a win for “freedom of speech”.