Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has ordered X to remove multiple posts containing CCTV footage of the fatal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in North Carolina, threatening fines of A$825,000 per day if the platform fails to comply.
The order, issued on September 26 by Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant, spans 20 pages and targets posts that include raw security footage of Zarutska’s final moments on a Charlotte train. X has since restricted access to the material for users in Australia, while keeping it visible elsewhere.
According to reports, Zarutska, 23, was attacked on her way to work by Decarlos Brown Jr., who allegedly stabbed her from behind multiple times, including once in the neck. Witnesses claim the attacker said, “I got that white girl.”
Belgian activist Dries Van Langenhove said one of his posts about Zarutska was flagged as illegal under Australian law.
“I knew the Australian government was crazy since Covid and since they locked up nationalist activists,” Van Langenhove wrote on X. “But why are they demanding X censor a European activist talking about an American murder?”
Political commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek reported receiving a similar notice.
“Got the exact same notification and 20-page letter for one of my posts about Iryna Zarutska’s murder,” she said. “The Australian eSafety Commissioner threatened to fine X $825,000 for each day the post would remain up, so it’s no longer visible in Australia.”
Vlaardingerbroek added, “Australians are paying taxes so bureaucrats can censor posts from European activists talking about the murder of a Ukrainian woman in America.”
Australian Senator Ralph Babet said he had been contacted by X users outside Australia who also received takedown notices.
“It’s not up to the eSafety Commissioner to dictate what Americans can and can’t view or what legal content Australians can and can’t view,” Babet said. “The office must be disbanded.”
Former MP Craig Kelly said the situation had made Australia “a laughing stock.”
“Our national reputation as a freedom-loving independent society was shredded during Covid – and now eSafety Karen is making Australia into the world’s biggest nanny state,” Kelly said.
Brian Marlow, Executive Director of the Australian Taxpayers Alliance, urged X to resist the fines: “The obvious solution is to keep the content up, let the eSafety issue the fines, refuse to pay them and force the government to go toe-to-toe with the U.S. administration,” he said.
Sky News Australia and Caldron Pool commentator Evelyn Rae questioned the motives behind the Commissioner’s actions, “It’s the selectivity of it that leads people to believe there’s a political agenda at play. X is riddled with explicit pornographic content, yet it is videos showing violence against white people or Christians that the eSafety Commissioner wants to suppress. Why is that?”
This is not the first time Elon Musk and X have clashed with Australia’s eSafety regulator. In 2024, Musk won a major legal victory after the Federal Court rejected the eSafety Commissioner’s bid to force X to globally remove videos of the Wakeley church stabbing.
Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant had reportedly demanded that X take down the footage for all users worldwide, not just within Australia. The order was issued under the Online Safety Act 2021, prompting a legal dispute in April 2024 over the scope of Australia’s online censorship powers.
Responding to the move, Musk said: “Our concern is that if any country is allowed to censor content for all countries — which is what the Australian ‘eSafety Commissar’ is demanding — then what is to stop any country from controlling the entire Internet?
“We have already censored the content in question for Australia, pending legal appeal, and it is stored only on servers in the USA,” he said.
In its ruling, the Federal Court found that the Commissioner lacked jurisdiction to impose Australian censorship standards on the rest of the world, concluding that such an order exceeded Australian regulatory authority.
Who knows how much the eSafety Commissioner’s crusade has already cost the Australian taxpayer? Do we really need an internet nanny—monitoring online content and deciding what legal material we should and shouldn’t be allowed to see? It’s an insult to Australian taxpayers to be treated like children, as though we need a parent filtering our access to the world.
And the concerns people are raising are valid. Her enforcement appears highly selective. It’s not difficult to find violent material on X. It’s not difficult to stumble across pornographic content. Yet it’s only certain crimes she seems determined to target. Why?
Aside from the fact that her efforts normalise government control over what legal content citizens can access, we must ask why she ignores pornography—a far more destructive force on families and society than CCTV footage of a crime. She is clearly operating within a particular moral framework, ranking content according to her own hierarchy of values. We need to identify what that moral standard is, and why she believes she has the authority to impose it on everyone else.
