Australia’s online censorship commissar threatened to fine X $825,000 per day unless it removed 23 posts containing CCTV footage of the brutal murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by a black career criminal in the US.
A delegate for eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant sent Elon Musk’s social media platform a 20-page removal notice on September 26, which X then passed on to affected users, including Belgian nationalist Dries Van Langenhove and American media broadcaster Alex Jones, whose watermark was on several of the videos.
Mr Van Langenhove revealed the global censorship attempt on Thursday, and on Saturday said in a post that he had been sent the entire letter by X’s legal team, asking his followers: “Who does Julie Inman Grant think she is?”
The Australian 🇦🇺 saga gets even crazier.
Moments ago X sent me a twenty-page letter they received from the Australian eSafety Commissioner in which she demands X removes or geoblocks the posts of 23 accounts including mine. X will be fined $825,000 (AUD) for each day that it… pic.twitter.com/7xC1V4WFXm
— Dries Van Langenhove (@DVanLangenhove) October 4, 2025
X has marked our story about Australia’s eSafety Commissioner trying to censor a post by @DVanLangenhove (who is in Europe) about an incident that happened in the US, as “potentially spammy or unsafe”.
We didn’t even include the “illegal” post in the story. pic.twitter.com/NElh2CkKCq
— The Noticer (@NoticerNews) October 3, 2025
The removal notice, seen by Noticer News, stated that the CCTV footage of Zarutska’s killing on the Charlotte subway had been “refused classification” in Australia and therefore must be removed by X, or geoblocked for Australian users.
“Failure to comply with the Notice may result in enforcement action, including the commencement of civil penalty proceedings for a civil penalty order of up to a maximum penalty of $825,000 (AUD) for a single contravention by a body corporate,” the notice stated, and gave X 24 hours to comply.
The 23 posts included those made by Mr Van Langenhove and Mr Jones, as well as Dutch political commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek, Malaysian commentator Ian Miles Cheong, British commentator Basil the Great, US commentator Pat Gray, and journalist Nick Sortor.
Mr Cheong responded by writing “Julie Inman Grant thinks she owns the internet.”
Julie Inman Grant thinks she owns the internet. https://t.co/KUEOrWl9Mq
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) October 4, 2025
Mr Van Langenhove, who has been subject to political persecution in his home country and is appealing a one-year jail sentence for supposedly offensive private chat group memes that he didn’t even post, also shared a photo of Ms Inman Grant with a far-left Swedish former politician.
“In one of her last posts before she left X, she is seen with Ylva Johansson, the communist (yes, she was a long time member of the Swedish communist party) and EU-commissioner for migration who said that ‘Europe needs a lot more migrants, a million more each year’ and who was the driving force behind the EU Migration Pact which wants to criminalise criticism of mass migration,” he wrote.
“We must push these communists out of power before it is too late.”
The censorship overreach comes as Ms Inman Grant, an unelected American-born bureaucrat who earns a $450,000/year taxpayer-funded salary and previously worked for Microsoft and Twitter, spearheads the Australian government’s social media age restrictions, which come into effect on December 10.
Ms Inman Grant is also responsible for bringing in mandatory search engine age checks, coordinated with a shadowy global “advertising cartel” to silence free speech, tried to censor a critic of radical gender ideology in schools, was criticised by Elon Musk for her failed legal attempts to impose a global censorship regime by forcing X to delete videos she claimed were illegal, and last year threatened to fine X $800,000 over a post calling a biological female a woman.
Header image: Left, Julie Inman Grant. Right, CCTV of moments before the murder of Iryna Zarutska.
