When ‘cohesion’ means
‘don’t dare mention it’

Our very own eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, who hails from the land of the First Amendment, isn’t too keen on Australians being exposed to thoughts and imagery of the sort which, in her highly paid opinion, does our sadly impressionable antipodean minds no good at all. Hence her tweet (above) and others in which she is adamant that nasty things need reporting to the  authorities.

She’s not specific about what shouldn’t be posted, but she’s adamant that, rather than being a vehicle for free speech, social media must be “an instrument of solidarity and social cohesion”.  And while she mentions “attacks” in the plural, one suspects it is not brave men fending off with stanchions and stout hearts the Bondi Junction lunatic but footage of a 16-year-old Muslim who took to a bishop with a knife for disrespecting his “Prophet”.

Not much of that “social cohesion” evident in the latter incident, so best if X users voluntarily limit their public thoughts. This will save the Commissioner the trouble of issuing more of her take-down orders. Out of sight out of mind, so let’s stick to cat clips for promoting that “solidarity”.

As Richard Fernandez writes, Ms Inman Grant, like so many of her World Economic Forum familiars, isn’t concerned so much about content but control:

They [the citizenry] need to make the right choices, yet … could be led astray by the purveyors of conspiracy theories, the WEF implies, thus destroying any hope of saving the global system unless responsible authorities intervene. Yet in the two most high profile examples of authorities suppressing ‘disinformation’, the cases of Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes versus Twitter’s Elon Musk and the government of Scotland versus renowned writer J.K. Rowling, do not involve information but authority.

In the former case nobody is actually citing lies that Twitter is alleged to have spread in Brazil. Neither is Rowling, by refusing to accept transgender ‘women’ as identical to biological women being challenged on factual grounds. Her offense is that her remarks are ‘hateful.’ Elon’s offense is ‘obstruction of justice’ for allowing Morae’s foes a platform to attack him.

Both cases have nothing to do with information and everything to do with authority.

Fernandez, whose posts are is always worth reading, has more to say at The Pipeline.

— rf