Australia has warned Elon Musk to make Twitter a safe space or face fines. Australia's eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant is telling Twitter owner Elon Musk to rid the platform of "toxicity and online hate," or it could levy fines up to $700,000 a day. While Grant indicated to ABC News Australia last week that she was particularly concerned about "anti-Semitic content" and "harmful posts" directed at Indigenous Australians and member of the LGBTQI+ community, she defined neither term.
Michael Morris of MRC Free Speech America says "toxicity" and "hate" could mean anything Australia wants them to mean and could change the definitions without notice anytime it wants.
"The Left often uses these vague terms that don't really mean anything. They're subjective," he tells AFN, "and they don't try to pin down an objective definition for what these things mean."
Morris encourages Musk – and others like him – to push back. "What he should do is what all … United States-based big tech platforms [should do]," he argues. "They should adhere to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution; they should protect free speech – and they should do so abroad."
In fact, the MRC spokesman says that should be in the value statements of all "Big Tech" companies.
"American values should be exported," he states bluntly. "We shouldn't be importing into American companies [any] foreign ideals and ideals that run counter to the principles that have made America great."
Morris noted that "wokeness" may have started in colleges and universities and migrated to Silicon Valley companies, but now it's starting to infiltrate governments, which have the power to force compliance. And he reiterated something that has been stated by many others: politics is downstream of culture.
"Conservatives, Christians, freethinkers need to explain to the populace that this leftist approach – really, this Marxist approach – is not a winning argument. It's not going to benefit society and in fact it's harmful," he emphasized.
According to several news reports, Australia has given Twitter 28 days to respond or face the fines.
