In September 2025, top government censorship officials from Europe, the UK, Brazil, California, and Australia met at Stanford to discuss ways to coordinate censorship at an international level. The meeting was titled “Compliance and Enforcement in a Rapidly Evolving Landscape.” Australia’s top censor, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, gave the keynote.
Though Grant did not provide her remarks to Public, she had previously told the World Economic Forum (WEF) that she was organising censorship officials around the world because “we know we’re going to go much further when we work together with other like-minded independent statutory authorities around the globe.”
Inman Grant’s efforts appear to be bearing fruit in Australia, where the lower house has passed the Digital Duty of Care (DDoC) Bill, a sweeping piece of censorship and surveillance legislation that would allow the eSafety Commissioner to monitor “lawful but harmful” speech.
Inman Grant, an American who once volunteered to a journalist that she turned down a job with the CIA, can already order a platform to reveal who is behind an anonymous account from anywhere in the world.
But the DDoC bill would also permit her to use fake accounts to deceive users into thinking they are citizens, record their legal speech, and pass what she learns directly to Australia’s spy agencies. Those agencies could then share that intelligence with the FBI and other “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing partners in the US, UK, Canada, and New Zealand.
The bill enables this by granting eSafety the ability to create an unlimited number of AI-generated “sock puppet” identities (effectively bots) under policies set “in consultation with the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police.”
The private information the Australian government could share with foreign intelligence agencies could include a user’s name, address, phone number, and email, along with what the Privacy Act calls “sensitive information,” which includes political opinions, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, and health records.
