ABC Backs a Censorious Loser

A few weeks ago, Australia’s censorship tsar, Julie Inman Grant, lost, again, to toddler-genius Elon Musk. This time, the battle centred around a tweet by Chris Elston, better known as Billboard Chris. BB Chris is an obsessive and humourless anti-trans troll, and his tweet attracted Inman Grant’s ire because it ridiculed a (pretty ridiculous) trans activist named Teddy Cook. Four people mentioned so far, and one can only wish that all four could be placed on a slow boat to Antarctica.

BB Chris posted his tweet in March last year and it quickly received about a zillion likes and retweets and so forth. Teddy complained to the eSafety thugs, who issued a removal notice to X. X removed the tweet, but then both X and BB Chris appealed eSafety’s removal notice to the Administrative Review Tribunal. On 1 July, the ART ruled against eSafety, ordering the removal notice be set aside.

Why did Inman Grant lose? In brief, because her thugs’ accusation was that BB Chris’s tweet amounted to an act of cyber-abuse, but the definition of cyber-abuse is simply too narrow to warrant the kind of censorship that was being attempted. No one was much arguing against the idea that BB Chris’s tweet was offensive. But cyber-abuse is not primarily about causing offense. Beyond the material being considered by an “ordinary reasonable person” to be offensive (or menacing or harassing), to constitute cyber-abuse it would also have to be considered likely that the material was “intended to have an effect of causing serious harm”. That BB Chris intended such serious harm was always a stretch and DP O’Donovan appeared to have little difficulty in judging that this was not the case.

To be clear, DP O’Donovan was not particularly critical of eSafety’s original removal notice; cyberbullying can escalate very quickly and quick remedial action can be appropriate. DP O’Donovan did seem very critical, however, of eSafety’s arguments after the fact. Much of the dispute before DP O’Donovan, and then much of his judgment, was concerned with how BB Chris’s intent was to be determined. The eSafety thugs argued that BB Chris’s tweet should be considered in and of itself, without reference to BB Chris’s more general activities and statements. That doesn’t come across as a good faith attempt to get at BB Chris’s intent with the tweet, and it was pretty easy for DP O’Donovan to judge that the legislative intent behind the Online Safety Act did not condone any such approach.

It is never a bad time to stick the boot into Inman Grant, but there is a different purpose to this post: it is to stick the boot into the ABC. When the ART came down with its judgment, the current affairs program 7:30 covered the story, and their report is one of the worst things I have ever seen on the ABC. The report is still up, as a selected clip, presumably because the ABC is too up itself to realise how bad it is.

The 7:30 report spends about fifteen seconds on the ART judgment, and without ever explaining how eSafety stuffed up, much less taking eSafety to task for stuffing up. The remaining six minutes of the report consisted of a free ad for Inman Grant, and bashing Musk and bashing X, and lamenting that such offensive material cannot be so easily censored, complete with interviews of an assortment of clowns also lamenting that such offensive material cannot be so easily censored. There was not a single hint that BB Chris, offensive though he may have been, may have had a point and that there was a serious free speech issue at play.

America is very good at free speech. That and baseball and Cajun food are about the country’s only redeeming features. But Australia, which is great in many ways, has always sucked at free speech. Hence, the current the idiocy of banning Nazi symbols and salutes, and attempting to legislate anti-semitism out of existence. The ABC is a proud part of this idiotic, anti-liberal position, and on the ART thing they screwed it up, in spades.

The ABC still has much of value, and one has to loathe Murdoch’s unceasing and dishonest and self-serving anti-ABC crusade. But it would really help if the ABC didn’t always put their thumb on the scale. In this instance, they put their entire fat ass on the scale.