The eSafety commissioner filed a lawsuit against X earlier this year for refusing to take down videos of a Sydney church stabbing that was motivated by religion for its users worldwide.
Commissioner Julie Inman Grant claims she experienced a “avalanche of online abuse” after Mr. Musk referred to her as the “censorship commissar” in a post to his 196 million followers, even though the matter was eventually abandoned.
When approached, X did not immediately react for comment, and the news was unable to get in touch with Mr. Musk personally.
Ms. Inman Grant was a relatively unknown character online before the court hearings, but on Friday, a Columbia University paper on technology-facilitated gender-based violence—which utilized her as a case study—found that she had been mentioned in roughly 74,000 posts on X.
The study revealed that most of the communications were hostile, hateful, or threatening in some other way. Users also regularly reported using gendered terminology and dehumanizing slurs, referring to Ms. Inman Grant as “captain tampon” or “left-wing Barbie.”
In an interview with the news, Ms. Inman Grant claimed that Mr. Musk’s choice to indicate that she was “trying to globally regulate the internet” through the use of “disinformation” had come from a “dog whistle from a very prominent tech billionaire who owns it.
