Tag: australia

Australia: Officials Ask Parliament to Restrict Social Media Clips of Public Hearing Evidence

Just when you thought Australia’s steamrolling toward censorship couldn’t get any worse, the heads of Australian government departments want new limits on how members of parliament share recordings of officials testifying at public parliamentary hearings.

A new attempt to this end was made last week by the Secretaries Board, made up of the heads of Australia’s government departments. The board is currently chaired by Steven Kennedy, secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, which advises the prime minister and coordinates policy across the government.

The proposal was contained in a submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Parliamentary Standards.

The board is unhappy that politicians are using excerpts of the footage from these hearings, often to criticize the officials, and sometimes to ridicule them, by editing the clips and adding captions to highlight certain parts of the testimony.

Comments left on social media under these posts are also a major concern for the board, as they can be “highly offensive” – and sometimes even defamatory.

As examples, the board cites personal attacks on officials’ physical appearance (especially if they are women), their integrity, as well as comparisons to “Nazis, pedophiles, and other criminal offenders.”

Some of the “highlights” of the comments mentioned in the submission include “despicable,” “filth,” “political puppet,” “bigot,” “pig,” “KKK member,” “parasite,” “shill,” “criminal,” “fraud,” “clown,” and “lying corrupt grub.”

The board wants parliament to come up with “guidance” on how to use these recordings on social media, and lists several ways to do it, such as preventing “potentially harmful” use of committee evidence, and requiring that a link to the full hearing or transcript is provided whenever an extract of an official’s testimony is posted.

Another idea is to have MPs disable comments on social media when they post these clips, and make sure that the full, unedited version of the hearing, or the transcript, is made available instead of extracts.

Reporting on the submission described full hearings and transcripts as the preferred approach, with fallback restrictions on editing, captions and posts targeting individual officials.

The submission said that officials appearing at these public hearings “have not consented to a subsequent use of their image, or its use by parliamentarians and their political parties for party-political purposes.”

And the board also complained of “the increasing use of excerpts from committee proceedings on social media, particularly where material is presented without context and exposes officials to ridicule, hostility or abuse.”

The proposal was rejected by Greens Senator Steph Hodgins-May, who said that bureaucrats should not be allowed to decide how parliamentarians do their job, and that the proposed restrictions would be an attempt to “take the teeth out of parliamentary scrutiny.”

“Bureaucrats shouldn’t get to decide where to draw the line on parliamentary scrutiny, particularly when they’re the ones being scrutinised,” Hodgins-May said. “Restricting what parliamentarians can post from public proceedings is not the answer. This looks like an attempt to take the teeth out of parliamentary scrutiny. Frankly, if this scrutiny wasn’t having an impact, they wouldn’t be so worried about it.”

But the board’s proposal is not the first of its kind. In fact, the previous week, Celia Perkins, deputy secretary of Australia’s Department of Defence, made a similar request to a parliamentary hearing, asking that the committee prevent MPs from sharing video and audio of officials appearing at public hearings on social media.

Perkins said that public servants giving evidence “do not consent to the reposting of our evidence to social media sites or the reproduction of our likenesses for the purposes outside the framework of the parliament and the transparent public proceedings of this committee.”

However, the Senate committee rejected the request on the advice of the Senate clerk.

Professor Luke Beck from the Monash University Law School, who specializes in constitutional law, believes that the latest proposal may be unconstitutional because it would likely violate the implied freedom of political communication in the Australian Constitution by “directly and expressly” burdening political communication.

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49ers’ Dre Greenlaw Asks if Antarctica is a ‘Lie’ During Team’s Australia Trip

Trips to far-away lands can expand one’s horizons – literally and figuratively. The 49ers’ trip to Australia seems to have expanded linebacker Dre Greenlaw’s mind in an unexpected way.

On Tuesday morning, reporters asked Greenlaw whether he had any questions for Australians. His answer did not disappoint.

“Do you have any questions you’d want to ask Australians?” asked ESPN’s Nick Wagoner.

“I mean, how far are we from Antarctica? That’s what I got. We’re right on top of it, huh? Does it snow probably pretty bad here? So, Antarctica, is it a lie?”

Reporters confirmed the continent’s existence, but that didn’t seem to satisfy Greenlaw.

“Y’all been there before?” he asked.

After receiving this challenge, the reporter said he had never been to Antarctica, which sent Greenlaw right into his well-prepared trap.

“Never been there. So how do you know if it’s cold or not?”

Of course, the reporters could have asked Greenlaw why a player with such curiosities and a high bar for proof had not invested any of the $7.5 million he signed for this year in making the trip to the mysterious continent to see it for himself.

After Tuesday’s exchange, perhaps he will.

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Australian Social Media Ban Flops Badly, as Teens Are Returning to TikTok ‘En Masse’

Albanese’s tricks have misfired.

There’s perhaps no more pristine example of a Globalist leader than Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese: the guy checks all the boxes.

He is obsessed with Net-zero and Paris-aligned climate targets, of course.

During the COVID crisis, we saw him angling to cede health-policy control to an unelected international body – and in fact, he seems to want to give up sovereignty altogether in favor of a ‘UN-centric multilateralism’.

Albanese has maintained a sustained high level of migration, and is big on ‘identity politics’.

And then, we come to his online-control ideas, which, of course, center around the nefarious ‘Digital-ID’, and have, as a first experiment, his ‘groundbreaking’ under-16 social-media ban.

We all understand Albanese’s online plans to be nothing but attempts at back-door surveillance, and a revival of the rejected and dropped ‘misinformation laws’.

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200,000 Fake AI ‘Victims’ Deployed To Scam-Bait Online Fraudsters

Australian tech firm Apate deploys a vast array of AI-bot characters worldwide that play the role of gullible scam victims to waste millions of hours of con artists’ time each month.

Hilariously, one of the company’s monthly performance metrics is how many times frustrated scammers swear at the idiot ‘victims’ who are playing dumb and stringing them along.

“I think we’re the only company in the world that is actually keeping as part of their KPIs the number of F-words that scammers are dropping at them,” Apate founder Dali Kaafar tells Magazine with a chuckle. 

The company has a stable of almost 200,000 AI characters that are able to hold convincing phone conversations and to chat on social media and messaging platforms.

”I can tell you that we’re basically servicing, as we call them, hundreds of thousands of calls a day, and pretty much hundreds of thousands of conversations on the other channels,” he says. 

Every hour of a con artist’s time they waste is another hour they’re not scamming a member of the public. In the six weeks up to the end of 2025, Apate’s bots engaged in 600,000 scam calls for a single telco called TPG in Australia. 

“Essentially, we wasted more than five hundred days of scammers’ time,” he explains. “That roughly equates to somewhere around thirteen million dollars being saved.”

The bots’ other goal is to elicit actionable intelligence for banks and telcos to combat scam rings across Australia, Asia, Africa and the UK and Europe.

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X Wins Australian Case Over Private Message Scanning Rule

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner wrote a rule requiring online services to scan what their users send each other. Not to act on reports, but to run detection systems across private messages before anyone has complained, hunting child sexual abuse and pro-terror material. Top censor, Julie Inman Grant, wrote it herself, under powers the Online Safety Act hands her, and breaching it carries penalties of up to $49.5 million.

Then she took the view that it covered social media platforms as well, because they let users send each other messages.

On August 12, the Federal Court told her it does not. The Relevant Electronic Services Standard “does not apply” to X, Justice Elizabeth Raper held, ruling for the platform in a case it brought in May 2025. It “would be rather perverse for a social media service…not to enable messaging or chat between end users,” X’s barrister had argued — on eSafety’s reading, having a DM function was enough to pull a platform into a rulebook written for something else.

The distinction is important because of who writes what. Social media services in Australia are covered by a code developed with the industry, X included. The RES Standard is not a negotiated code. It is an instrument the Commissioner drafts and enforces herself. The standard says it applies “to the exclusion of any industry code” — so reading it to cover social media would have let the instrument she controls displace the one she negotiated.

Raper said so directly. “I accept X Corp’s characterisation of the facts that the RES Standard has been made by the commissioner…as a standard applicable to participants in a different section of the online industry, that are specified…as ‘providers of relevant electronic services’,” she wrote.

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X Warns Australia’s Censor Wants Reach Beyond Australia

X has told the Australian Senate committee that a proposal expanding the powers of the nation’s top censor would let the regulator demand documents from people outside of Australia. The only connection that would be required for X to have to hand over documents to Australia’s eSafety Commissioner is that the person is “affiliated” with a platform.

The submission, published Tuesday, targets the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026. The bill cleared the House of Representatives on July 1 and hit the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee on the same day. That committee will report on August 25.

The changes would “compel any person outside Australia…to provide information and documents merely because they are ‘affiliated’ with a company,” X said in a filing.

X described that as being “in clear conflict” with international legal principles, warning that the amendment “raises potential for a severe impact on international comity.”

X said the plans gave no “due regard to procedural fairness, privacy, the broader impacts on online services, and Australia’s digital economy.”

A company that fails to take “reasonable” steps to keep under-16s off its platform currently faces a penalty of up to A$49.5 million or 30,000 penalty units. The bill doubles that to A$99 million, around US$69 million, for systematic breaches.

Under the bill, eSafety could also compel the records from the third-party digital ID vendors that platforms hire, as well as from app store operators.

Those vendors hold face scans, ID document images, and inference data drawn from Australians who handed over sensitive data in order to stay on the platform after Australia banned social media for under 16s.

The bill would give the government regulator a legal route into all of that data that it recently mandated to be collected.

eSafety complained to the panel that its current authority to compel documents lags behind that of other regulators and that it’s left to depend on “representations from providers about their own compliance.”

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Homeland Security Arrests Australian Permanent Resident For Illegally Voting In 2022 And 2024 Federal Elections After Falsely Claiming U.S. Citizenship

An Australian lawful permanent resident living in Louisiana has been busted by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) for ILLEGALLY VOTING in two federal elections after she falsely claimed to be a U.S. citizen.

Denise Nataly Migliore, 51, of Franklinton, Louisiana, originally from Sydney, Australia, was arrested by HSI New Orleans on July 1, 2026, right at the federal courthouse in New Orleans.

She was indicted on June 11, 2026, in the Eastern District of Louisiana on a four-count indictment: two counts of illegal voting in an election and two counts of making false statements to register to vote.

According to the DOJ:

According to the indictment, on or about October 6, 2022, and on or about October 22, 2024, MIGLIORE,at the time a legal permanent resident, knowingly made false claims to U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote in in a Federal election. On or about November 8, 2022, and November 5, 2024, MIGLIORE cast a ballot, which was obtained by falsely certifying that she was a U.S. citizen and eligible to vote, when, in fact, she was not eligible to vote because she was not a citizen of the United States.

If convicted, MIGLIORE faces a maximum penalty of five (5) years in prison, followed by three (3) years of supervised release. MIGLIORE also faces a fine of up to $250,000, and a $100.00 mandatory special assessment fee.

“This alien from Australia now faces federal charges for falsely claiming to be a U.S. citizen and illegally casting ballots in two elections,” said Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis.

“Her arrest and charges are the result of the hard work of the men and women of ICE law enforcement and our federal partners. Our message to aliens who vote in American elections is clear: we will find you, arrest you, and you will face the consequences, including criminal charges and deportation. Only Americans should be electing American leaders.”

Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry credited the state’s proactive use of the federal SAVE database and her Election Integrity Division for helping flag this case in partnership with federal authorities.

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YouTube defends video that falsely claims Sydney massacre survivor is ‘crisis actor’

A Google executive told an inquiry on Tuesday that a YouTube video that falsely claimed a wounded survivor of an antisemitic massacre in Sydney was a crisis actor blooded with makeup had met the platform’s standards and would remain online.

Google Australia manager Rachel Lord was testifying at a government inquiry into the spread of antisemitism in Australia including an attack by two gunmen on a Sydney Hanukkah celebration in December that left 15 dead.

Lord was questioned about a complaint made by survivor Arsen Ostrovsky about a video posted on YouTube. Ostrovsky was attacked online after an image showing blood streaming from a wound in his head was posted on X two hours after he was shot.

Lord said the decision to allow the video to remain on YouTube had been reviewed at “quite senior levels.”

“We have spent a lot of time thinking about where we draw the line and we continue to re-evaluate where we are doing that,” Lord said.

Richard Lancaster, the lawyer leading the inquiry’s evidence, referred to a transcript of the video to avoid showing the images in public.

Four men appear on split screen saying Ostrovsky’s bleeding head appeared “very crisis actor-ish” and mentioned “makeup.” They also describe him as an “intelligence asset” who had a “degree in theater.”

The video also describes Ostrovsky as a Zionist and claims the massacre was a “false flag operation.” Police allege father and son shooters Sajid and Naveed Akram were inspired by the Islamic State group.

Lancaster told Lord the video remaining online demonstrated a “really serious deficiency” in YouTube’s hate speech guidelines.

Lord replied that she appreciated Lancaster’s “feedback.”

YouTube told Australia’s online safety regulator three days after the massacre that the platform was “focused on ensuring Australians and all users around the world have access to high quality information about the tragic events,” Lord said.

Ostrovsky told the inquiry last month that he had been targeted by online hate, abuse, vilification and AI manipulation since he suffered the minor head wound on Dec. 14.

The inquiry was then shown an AI-generated image of Ostrovsky apparently laughing as someone applied fake blood to his head.

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Australia’s Top Censor Wants Power Over The “Ratio”

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner wants legal power to order social media companies to shield favored users from criticism and to suspend everyone piling on against them. Julie Inman Grant made the pitch on July 2, testifying to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, the government probe set up after the Bondi Beach terror attack.

She calls the tool a “notification power.” What it does is let her office tell a platform that a particular Australian account is under heavy criticism and demand that the platform punish the accounts responsible.

Her own description of the trigger runs to “insulting” and “ugly” comments stacking up beneath someone’s posts. “If there’s a pile-on, if there’s a brigade, if it’s meant to be an avalanche of online hate, we put the onus back on the platform to say, this Australian is being targeted,” she told the commission.

“We expect you to protect their account and take action against all of those people that you can see… whether it’s you just suspend them or you take them away.”

Watch the video here.

She wants the power to reach across platforms, too. The current adult cyber-abuse rules frustrate her because they force her office to “look at that specific tweet” rather than the whole swarm of replies beneath it. The fix she wants hands platforms a standing order to police disapproval on her behalf.

Grant does not think of this as censorship, of course. Asked about companies that frame their resistance as free speech, she said “it’s easy to slip a censorship label on just about anything,” and offered a softer account of her own work. “What we’re trying to do is minimize harm. Encourage as much speech as possible, but when it veers into the lane of hurting individuals, hurting communities, hurting society and undermining democracy, I think we all need to band together and take more of a stand.”

The regulator asking for authority to suspend users in bulk says her goal is more speech.

Who defines the harm that flips speech from protected to punishable? She does. Phrases like “hurting communities” and “undermining democracy” stretch far enough to cover most heated political argument, and the office reaching for them writes the definition.

Much of her testimony was a complaint that the companies keep winning. eSafety has eight cases running against X Corp, and Grant said six of them were “led by X.” She cast the legal pushback as commercial greed dressed up in principle, accusing platforms of fighting “to be able to serve, share and monetize horrific content.”

Asked whether she had actually seen platforms fight to monetize such material, she answered “I can’t imagine any other reason they would want to put it up there.”

The clearest example she offered cuts against her. After the Wakely church stabbing of Assyrian bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, eSafety sent formal removal notices to Meta and X. “Meta applied within the hour, and then of course, X Corp said, ‘We’re not taking it down, we’ll see you in court,’” Grant said.

X won the legal challenge. And the bishop whose stabbing she cited as the reason to censor went on to back Elon Musk and defend free speech from the pulpit in his first sermon after surviving the attack.

The person eSafety said it was protecting did not want her protection.

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Aus police to review interactions with Epstein accuser before her death

Interactions between Jeffrey Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre and Australian police prior to her death will be reviewed, Western Australia’s police commissioner has confirmed.

Giuffre, 41, died by suicide at her semi-rural property north of Perth in April of last year.

The investigation will focus on officers’ handling of a dispute between Giuffre and a former partner, commissioner Col Blanch said.

Giuffre was at one point charged with breaching a restraining order in relation to the dispute.

She had long alleged she was trafficked for sex to former prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and others when she was a teenager.

Giuffre was one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers and was an advocate for survivors of sex trafficking.

The review would be carried out in response to a letter sent by Giuffre’s family, Blanch said.

“We respond to over 100,000 family violence incidents every year,” he told a Western Australia parliament hearing on Wednesday morning.

“I’d love to give assurance on every single one, but I can’t — but that one will be subject to a review.”

The state’s coroner and ombudsman could also launch investigations, he said.

Members of Giuffre’s family have called for a coronial inquest into her death, which has been backed up by a group of domestic violence experts.

An open letter signed by 16 experts in domestic violence, family violence and violence against women was sent to the WA coroner earlier this month.

“Virginia Giuffre spent much of her adult life in courageous pursuit of accountability for the abuse she suffered, taking significant personal risk to expose a network of exploitation and in doing so helping to protect other women,” the letter read.

“It would be a profound injustice if the question of whether systems failed her in her final months were not examined with equivalent rigour.”

It said she may have been a victim of domestic violence in the lead up to her death, and cited a 2022 WA Ombudsman investigation that found 56% of women and children who died by suicide in the state had previously been identified as victims of domestic and family violence.

“Her public profile means there is an unusually detailed record of her final months – and what that record shows is deeply consistent with what our research tells us about how these deaths occur, and how they are too often overlooked.

“Conducted with full attention to the domestic and family violence context of her death, such an inquest has the potential to generate findings and recommendations that reach far beyond this one case and that could prevent future deaths.”

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