Julie Inman Grant once taught “social media self-defence” to women in public life. Then came the online pile-on from Elon Musk’s followers – and she found herself taking her own advice.
When eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant was branded Australia’s “censorship commissar” by Elon Musk in 2024, the fallout came fast: 75,000 posts in 24 hours, 80% of them toxic, against her and her children.
But speaking at Forbes Australia’s Women’s Summit, the eSafety Commissioner argued the personal cost only reinforced her conviction that tech platforms must build safety protections into their systems before harm spirals out of control.
“This will be a shadow that will follow me for the rest of my life,” she told the summit. “A lot of MAGA congressmen and others have targeted me as a result. I’ve experienced doxing, deep fakes and death threats, many death threats, some of them quite credible, which is an extraordinary price to pay.
“And it came out that that video on X was accessed by the killer 25 minutes before he stabbed those little girls, and he claimed that was his inspiration to do that.”
eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant
“But at the same time, I know exactly what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to get me to self-censor, they’re trying to get me to leave public life.”
Before any of this had happened, Inman Grant had tried to start a program called Women in the Spotlight to teach “social-media self-defence” to such attacks.” So she took her own advice.
“My Twitter handle is dormant. eSafety no longer has a handle, and I try and build my psychological armour.”
The stoush with Musk blew up after X [formerly Twitter] refused to take down a video of the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel in Wakeley, Sydney in April 2024.
“We effectively used our transparency powers against the same company around online hate. Ten days after he [Musk] took over the company [in late 2022], the new digital sheriff walked into the town square, let everyone out of Twitter jail, about 62,000, and then fired all the first responders…”
‘We were fighting a battle in court, we were also fighting a battle in the court of public opinion. I knew that, compared to a billionaire of that stature, I was going to be outmanned and outgunned … But I’m so glad we held on to our conviction … This was a very violent video of a bishop being stabbed in the face and the neck. That normalises, it desensitises, and sometimes radicalises.
“So that content was geoblocked here, but it was available in the rest of the world.”
It emerged that three months after the Sydney stabbing, three girls were murdered at a Taylor Swift dance party in Southport, UK.
“And it came out that that video on X was accessed by the killer 25 minutes before he stabbed those little girls, and he claimed that was his inspiration to do that.”
“So that is never the kind of footnote or the end note that you want to a story like that, but this is why we soldier on despite the personal cost.”
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