“Recalibrating” censorship in Australia

The objects of the Commonwealth Online Safety Act2021 (OS Act) are (a) to improve and (b) to promote – online safety for all Australians. When regard is had to what Australia's eSafety Commissioner, Ms Julie Inman Grant, says on her official web site about her statutory role, her concern for making children (excluding the ideologically convenient elastic descriptor "young persons") "safe from online harm" is one shared by all right-thinking persons.

However, the OS Act (which was preceded by the Enhancing Online Safety Act 2015) is not confined to child protection. And what the Commissioner has been saying about the need to keep adults "safe from online harm" is controversial, not least because of the glaring ambiguity of abstractions including "safe", "safety", "harm", "inappropriate content" and "transparency", the powers that the Commissioner has under the OS Act to censor online content, and her support for limiting freedom of speech.

At the recent annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting at Davos, Switzerland, the Commissioner participated in a panel discussion on "Ushering in a Safer Digital Future" in which she made the following cautionary comment:

"We are finding ourselves in a place we have increasing polarization everywhere. And everything feels binary when it doesn't need to be. So, I think we're going to have to think about a recalibration of a whole range of human rights that are playing out online from freedom of speech to the freedom to be, you know, to be free from online violence or the right of data protection to the right to child dignity."

The Commissioner has described her over-arching statutory role as a manifestation of a broad socio-political "Safety by Design" quest – a quartet of abstractions: "the four Rs of the digital age are respect, resilience, responsibility and recovery.". Nowadays, the word "respect" is increasingly used to insist that we must respect ideas which we may reject. This quest is one being undertaken in co-operation with and for the Big Tech companies. That creed fits in seamlessly with the WEF and its "Mission", "Governance", and "Partners".

As the world's first regulatory authority established to tackle existing and future online harms, Australia's eSafety Commissioner has a seat at the WEF table shaping governance of the coming extended reality world, working alongside 60 of the world's largest tech providers.

The common law of torts with occasional supplementary statutory reforms contains very specific tests for liability for personal injury. They are embodied in three inter-related concepts - reasonable foreseeability of physical and psychiatric harm based on risk assessment, the specification of discrete factors governing the standard of care, and limitations on recoverability of remote damage.

The "harm" to which the OS Act applies in the case of adults, exhibits what might be regarded as a superficially similar quality in, for example, the definition in s 7 of "cyber-abuse material targeted at an Australian adult"which includes these words:

"... (b) an ordinary reasonable person would conclude that it is likely that the material was intended to have an effect of causing serious harm to a particular Australian adult; (and)

(c) an ordinary reasonable person in the position of the Australian adult would regard the material as being, in all the circumstances, menacing, harassing or offensive..."

However, the OS Act is directed at a categorically different form of alleged "harm". It is an emanation of the modern confected ideology that there are groups of people who, by reason of some characteristic innate or chosen, are entitled to privileged protection because the group members are, without a single exception, "vulnerable", "powerless". "marginalised", "dehumanised", "demonised", and other insulting generalizations.

The Commissioner has the power to give a removal notice to the provider of a social media service, relevant electronic service or designated internet service. Section 45 of the OS Act provides for the responsible federal Minister for Communications, Urban Infrastructure, Cities and the Arts to make, by legislative instrument, a determination setting out "basic online safety expectations for a social media service, relevant electronic service or designated internet service." (my emphasis) In the context of the OS Act, the Commissioner's recent claim to the WEF attendees at Davos that there is too much "polarization" can only be taken to mean that there is too much online "controversy" and debate, and that it has to be strictly controlled for "Safety's" sake. Thus, when regard is had to her web site and her use of the abstraction recalibration, her Office's clear position is that Australia needs more censorship legislation:

"No one should have to put up with people being rude to them or making fun of them because of things like their family background, culture, race, religion, gender or sexuality. Some things that may be OK for you to say in your family or with your friends might not be OK for others, so be careful online." (my emphasis)

The WEF's Global movers and "shapers" (its terminology) – a tiny percentage of a minuscule percentage of the World's population – who can afford to assemble at Davos to advance the WEF crusade assert that their top-down prescriptions are essential for the survival of humanity, but there is no mention of public opinion or debate or dissent. Only WEF's well-to-do "Partners" and "Stakeholders" participate in its "recalibrations".

The Commissioner's web site statements make clear that her commitment to her statutory responsibilities is anchored in her "early work as a young Washington, DC lobbyist working for a guy named Bill at a little software company called Microsoft." She has extensive experience in the non-profit and government sectors, including two decades working in senior public policy and "safety roles" in the tech industry at Twitter and Adobe. Her later experience at Microsoft spanned 17 years, serving as one of the company's first and longest-standing government relations professionals, ultimately in the role of Global Director for Safety and Privacy Policy and Outreach. At Twitter, she set up and drove the company's policy, safety and philanthropy programmes in Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia.

As eSafety Commissioner, Ms Inman Grant serves on the (WEF) Global Coalition for Digital Safety and on its XR Ecosystem Governance Steering Committee on Building and Defining the Metaverse. She plays an important global role as Chair of the Child Dignity Alliance's Technical Working Group and as a Board Member of the WePROTECT Global Alliance of which Australia is a member. And, under her leadership, Australian eSafety has joined forces with the White House Gender Policy Council, and the Government of Denmark on the Global Partnership for Action on Gender-Based Harassment and Abuse.

In 2020, the WEF and an organization teasingly called Apolitical appointed the Commissioner as one of the #Agile50– a joint initiative by Apolitical and the WEF Global Future Council on Agile Governance– described by the Commissioner as, "the world's most influential leaders revolutionising government."

Not noted for its modesty, Apolitical announces to the world on its web site that The #Agile50 is "the world's 50 most influential people navigating disruption".

The WEF is a self-labelled messianic organization. One distinctive indicator of its claim to have a complete big corporate system for World Governance is its use of numerous intricate and interconnected diagrams and displays – in WEF-Newspeak("Transformation Maps") For anyone wanting to delve deeply into the holistic nature of the WEF mission for "the Metaverse" as it affects the rights of the individual, one useful starting point is its December 2021 White Paper (in collaboration with Mercer), Pathways to Social Justice: A Revitalized Vision for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Workforce. In reality that brand of "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" is WEF "Newspeak" for its Big Business/Big Tech top-down rigid social control.

WEF likes to boast that for over 50 years it has been what it calls "the international organization with a single guiding vision (my emphasis). One subject which is high on its list of priorities is thought leadership and more specifically, reducing the risk of online harm, advancing digital content safety, thereby ushering in a safer digital future.

Mr Schwab has spent five decades on his impossible dream. He has advanced to the forefront of worldwide attention in the COVID years. Opinions will, necessarily, differ on whether Mr Schwab's "influence" on worldwide events is, fortuitously, more apparent than real. Mr Schwab has no doubt about the reality and rectitude of his elitist global role. Nor, it seems, does the United Nations. On 13 June 2019, the WEF and the UN signed a Strategic Partnership Framework which jointly accelerates implementation of 2030 as the date for saving the planet. The sample diagram on its cover is one recent pointer to the WEF's dogmatic universalism. Everything is connected to everything else. It could not be otherwise if it is to accord with Mr Schwab's messianic vision as expressed in The Great Reset(2020).

Mr Schwab's expectation of the WEF is that all us unanointed folks – the vulgus or proles – are, by definition, beyond resisting the WEF's sphere of influence. At this year's Davos gabfest, Mr Schwab vouchsafed to one of his interlocutors the following confident assessment of the centrality of the WEF in the zeitgeist:

"What we are very proud of now the young generation now like Prime Minister Trudeau now, the President of Argentina and so on that we penetrate the Cabinets. So yesterday I was at a reception for Prime Minister Trudeau and so I would know that half of his cabinet or even more than half of his cabinet are actually [WEF] young global leaders of the world."