Australia is caught in a tug of war between free speech and censorship.

The former is overwhelmingly preferred by the voting public of all persuasions except the Greens, while the latter is the deepest held desire of the Canberra collective save for a few dissenting conservatives.

If our MPs and Senators respected democracy and voted according to the wishes of their electorates, Australia would be a free speech haven. Sadly, as was proven once again last week with the introduction of yet more punitive speech laws, censorship has become a way for politicians to bury problems rather than solve them.

Part of this mess includes the Coalition’s Online Safety Act 2021 which expanded the powers of the dreaded eSafety Commissioner.

The position was created under Tony Abbott through the Enhancing Online Safety for Children Act 2015 and the current eSafety Commissioner was appointed in 2017.

Some feel the role of increased eSafety was a thought bubble designed to make ‘the scary internet safer’ in the eyes of a voting base that either did not use social media, or disliked it as a ‘sewer for lefties’. Why not shut it down, eh?

Today, there are calls for the eSafety Commissioner to resign following the suggestion that her office was acting outside expectations with its use of informal takedown notices.

This is what happened…

The Online Safety Act is a rather embarrassing attempt by Australia to police the global internet, which is a bit like watching a teacup chihuahua standing on the sand, barking at a blue whale. They are not living in the same plane of reality.

When Silicon Valley and its assortment of social media platforms hunted down anything vaguely conservative, there wasn’t much for Australian censors to do. That changed with the emergence of politically sensitive Covid and Climate Change discussions. Governments, including Australia under the Coalition, began issuing takedown orders to silence political dissent under the excuse of public health and safety. The Department of Home Affairs issued requests to social media over so-called Covid misinformation.

Censorship fell out of fashion after Elon Musk purchased Twitter and published The Twitter Files (an exposé on government censorship). Similar revelations followed from Facebook. Pro-Trump conservatism has since swamped the algorithms and previously controversial topics have become trending news headlines.

Online censorship appears to have shifted from don’t say mean things about Covid to an emphasis on cyber bullying. This raises the question, what is bullying and what is valid public criticism?

Into this environment steps Celine Baumgarten, who goes by Celine Against the Machine on X and describes herself as:

Adult human female. Proud Australian. Bi, not queer. Two sexes, one truth. Facts over feelings. Celebrate masculinity. Protect women and children.

Her pinned tweet says that, ‘I don’t want to raise my daughter in a country with a Ministry of Truth.’

Like many Australians, Celine was concerned about the saturation of age-inappropriate LGBTQ+ content in educational environments, often distributed by people in positions of authority (such as teachers). Do preschoolers really need to learn about queer sexual content? Should educators indulge and encourage gender confusion? Who decided it was okay to install trans flags in classrooms?

The LGB community found themselves receiving severe criticism thanks to the actions of a minority of activists. Gays Against Groomers is an online group set up so that gays and lesbians can speak against ‘the sexualisation, indoctrination, and medicalisation of children under the guise of LGBTQIA+’.

In old money, it is a counter-protest movement.

As part of this group, Celine put up an awareness post about a school running a queer club for kids in Grade 3-6.

The story was packaged by Celine, approved by Gays Against Groomers, and posted to their X account. Less than a week later, Celine received an email from twitter-legal@x.com informing her that:

‘X has received a request from the eSafety Commissioner regarding your X account … the following content violates the law(s) of Australia … in order to comply with X’s obligations under Australia’s local laws, we have withheld this content in Australia, the content remains available elsewhere.’

It is clear that X believed the informal notice it received from the eSafety Commissioner was legally stronger than it actually was.

This notice was thought to reference ‘cyber-abuse material targeted at an Australian adult’ (being the teacher in the video).

We now know that there are two main mechanisms available to the eSafety Commissioner: an informal ‘complaint alert’ and a formal statutory content removal notice.

Hundreds of informal complaints are issued whereas only three or four formal removal notices are sent per year.

An example of a formal removal notice was the televised stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, an event many considered to be a news item. The eSafety Commissioner abandoned a Federal Court case with Elon Musk over the matter which many viewed as a test of the eSafety Commissioner’s powers (or lack thereof).

As the Government Affairs account of X posted:

‘This case has raised important questions on how legal powers can be used to threaten global censorship of speech, and we are heartened to see that freedom of speech has prevailed.’

That was a victory against formal notices. Celine has been fighting the informal notices, which are much faster to draft and do not involve a legal threshold.

It appears X complied with the ‘suggestion’ from the eSafety Commissioner because it had come in via X’s ‘takedown portal’.

Most people who are censored in this way by the eSafety Commissioner never find out, especially if they are on a platform other than X. This is something the Free Speech Union of Australia has addressed by creating a portal so anyone can check. Find out if the eSafety Commissioner censored you.

Baumgarten and eSafety Commissioner (Guidance and Appeals Panel) at the Administrative Review Tribunal of Australia has served as a necessary test of the Online Safety Act.

The Tribunal expressed concern about censorship on digital platforms. It seems, at least, that those who are being censored should be told and further, the legal nature of the order should be made clear to the social media platform.

Reuben Kirkham, from the Free Speech Union of Australia, said, ‘This is a landmark decision and means that the eSafety Commissioner’s program of secret censorship should be no more.’

Even if the eSafety Commissioner believes this type of censorship to be desirable, public opinion has coalesced around a preference for free speech, particularly on political topics.

We have Celine and the Free Speech Union of Australia to thank for this decision.

It might seem like a lot of effort to go to over a tweet, but government censorship is like a thief picking the lock. All it takes is a few successful attempts and the gates are open to all manner of mayhem.