Australia's eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has been labelled a ‘zealot for global takedowns’ by some Trump-aligned politicians. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP View image in fullscreen Australia's eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has been labelled a ‘zealot for global takedowns’ by some Trump-aligned politicians. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP Australian politics Analysis Australia may risk a diplomatic spat with the Trump administration if it limits the viewing of a US execution Josh Taylor A history of tech giant legal challenges and US political criticism shows there’s no easy solution for the eSafety commissioner
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Australia’s online safety regulator has a few levers to limit the public seeing the US’s planned live stream of an execution but history suggests it will lead to a very public fight.
The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, announced last week the planned execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan would be livestreamed when the military execution is carried out in early December .
The Greens have called on the eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, and the Albanese government to ensure that the event – if it goes ahead and is livestreamed – is not seen by Australians on TV or their devices.
Read more The eSafety commissioner, under the Online Safety Act, has powers to order platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and X to block Australians from accessing posts that contain content deemed to be “refused classification” under Australian classification law.
The classification of such extreme violent material is typically applied to content online of terror attacks, and other terror-related content, but it could be applied to clips of the video of the public execution after the fact.
While some companies such as Meta will probably apply their own terms of service and prevent the distribution of the video, history suggests others will take a stand that the video should remain on their platforms.
X has given no indication whether it will allow such videos but the platform owned by Elon Musk has a long history of legal challenges against eSafety when it comes to this sort of content.
In 2024, X was successful in allowing footage of the stabbing of a Sydney bishop in his church in 2024 to remain available to Australians – the platform even recruited the bishop, Mar Mari Emmanuel, to argue to the court to allow the footage to stay online.
Most recently, X won an appeal to the classifications review board to have the classification of the video of the assassination of rightwing influencer Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University downgraded from RC to R18+, after eSafety ordered the removal of clips of the assassination last year.
It also won a similar case to reduce the rating of videos of the attack on Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, in August last year down to R18+.
In laws passed by the former Coalition government in 2019 after the Christchurch terror attack, the eSafety commissioner also has powers to issue takedown notices to websites hosting footage that, among other things, depicts “actual violent crime such as murder, attempted murder, rape, torture”.
These laws were developed with the view to block streaming of terror attacks but could have wider applications for state-sponsored violence such as executions.
The eSafety commissioner last used these powers in 2022 to order websites to remove videos and related materials of…