Well, Australia’s eKaren has been given another well-deserved legal shellacking. The only problem is that the taxpayer is paying for it and losing only encourages this demented inquisitor.
Elon Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter) has won a lawsuit it brought against Australia’s eSafety Commissioner after the Federal Court found on Wednesday that the company does not need to follow a new safety standard for harmful online content […]
X successfully argued it could not be designated under Australia’s Online Safety Act as both a ‘social media service’ and a ‘relevant electronic service’, with Justice Elizabeth Raper writing that the RES Standard therefore “does not apply” to X, which both parties agreed is a social media platform.
In other words, eKaren cannot simply declare that messaging features magically reclassify it as something else and thereby bypass the industry code that was actually negotiated for social media platforms. Justice Raper was clear: the commissioner’s construction “would not sit comfortably with the act’s structure”. It would let her create a standard for one sector and then apply it to providers already covered by another, effectively short-circuiting the consultative model parliament designed.
In plain English, she overreached. Again.
In a statement to Information Age, eSafety said it acknowledged the court’s decision and will consider its next steps.
We all know what those will be: she will just rinse and repeat, trying the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different outcome. There’s a word for that.
This is becoming a pattern so consistent it borders on a farce. Only days ago she was threatening X with a near-million-dollar fine for hosting a factual post that merely pointed out an AMA Victoria staffer who publicly posts extreme self-made transgender pornography on sites any child can access. Far from protecting children from online porn, eKaren was busy defending the pornographer. The same official who once tried to censor completely factual news footage of a bishop being stabbed in a Sydney church now spends public money shielding adults who specialise in graphic content.
Courts have already criticised her for deliberately exceeding her lawful authority. In the Celine Baumgarten case, the Full Federal Court rejected the extraordinary claim that because a take-down notice was “informal”, and beyond power, it somehow escaped scrutiny. The judges held that a government official cannot purport to exercise power, achieve a coercive result and then claim immunity because they acted outside their power. Absolute chutzpah. Yet nothing changes.
She has lost to Billboard Chris. She has lost to Baumgarten. She has now lost to X on the RES Standard. Each time the taxpayer foots the bill, while her salary and empire remain untouched. The process is the punishment: force platforms to burn legal fees and extract compliance costs, then shrug when the courts eventually slap her down.
How many lost and vexatious cases does it take before someone in Canberra finally holds this unelected inquisitor to account? The answer, under both major parties so far, appears to be as many as she likes. Because she’s doing exactly what she was always intended to: be a demented, remorseless, untouchable inquisitor punishing any perceived heresy against establishment elite’s ‘progressive’ dogmas.
