The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has given Elon Musk's X 24 hours to delete a post by American feminist writer Genevieve Gluck or face a fine of up to $910,000.

The notice went to X on Tuesday under section 88 of the Online Safety Act 2021. It classes Gluck's post as "cyber-abuse material targeted at an Australian adult", a definition the government's own review found only about 6% of complaints ever meet. X has since withheld the post from users in Australia while leaving it visible everywhere else, according to The Noticer, which first reported the notice.

The post links to an article Gluck, who cofounded the feminist site Reduxx in 2022 and is its chief investigative journalist, published in 2024 about a staff member at the Australian Medical Association's Victorian branch. One News isn't naming the staff member. Gluck's article carried screenshots of sexually explicit material she says the staff member had posted publicly, and argued it raised questions about their suitability for a role that involves dealing with medical regulators.

"I have been notified by the Australian eSafety Commissioner that a trans-identified male has lodged a legal complaint against me regarding a Substack post I published about his fetishistic activities in 2024," Gluck wrote.

An AMA Victoria spokeswoman has said the branch is a separate legal entity from the federal AMA, and that neither the branch nor the employee had any involvement in developing AMA policy on gender medicine.

It's the third notice of its kind to become public since early 2024. Her office lost the first two, one at a tribunal and one on appeal to the Full Federal Court.

The $910,000 is the same threat that already failed once

Nobody has explained where the number comes from, so here it is. Section 88 carries a maximum civil penalty of 500 penalty units. Because X is a company, the multiplier for bodies corporate lifts that to 2,500 units. A Commonwealth penalty unit rose to $364 on 1 July 2026. That's $910,000.

The same section, at the same 2,500 units, produced the $782,500 figure attached to a removal notice her office sent X in March 2024 over a post by Canadian campaigner Chris Elston, who goes by Billboard Chris. The penalty unit was $313 back then.

So in real terms it's the identical threat, over the identical category of speech, under the identical section. The only things that have changed are the consumer price index and the fact that a tribunal threw the first one out.

Chris Elston's post was pulled for misgendering, then the Tribunal threw the notice out

Elston's February 2024 post criticised the appointment of Australian trans activist Teddy Cook to a World Health Organisation panel writing guidance on transgender healthcare. Inman Grant's office decided the post was adult cyber abuse and ordered X to take it down. X blocked it in Australia and then fought the notice alongside Elston.

On 1 July 2025 the Administrative Review Tribunal set it aside. Deputy President Damien O'Donovan found it fell short of the test in section 7 of the Act, which requires an ordinary reasonable person to conclude the material was intended to cause serious harm to a particular Australian adult. There was no evidence Elston meant to cause serious harm, and no evidence he intended Cook to see the post at all.

Celine Baumgarten's post was cleared by eSafety's own investigator, then taken down anyway

The second case is the one that matters most, and it's the one almost nobody has read.

In May 2024 Sydney woman Celine Baumgarten posted on X about a "queer club" run at a Melbourne primary school, saying children shouldn't be learning about sexualities at that age. Someone complained to eSafety. The eSafety officer who assessed the complaint concluded it didn't meet the definition of cyber abuse material in section 7, because the intention to cause serious harm wasn't there.

The post was removed anyway. On 3 June 2024 that same officer entered the complaint into X's Legal Requests Portal, and X blocked the post in Australia. Baumgarten found out by email at 7.28pm that evening. She was never told who'd asked for it, or that she had a right of appeal.

She appealed regardless. eSafety's answer was that the message it sent X wasn't a removal notice at all, just an informal "complaint alert" that carried no legal force, so no tribunal could review it. That argument ran all the way to the Full Federal Court, which dismissed the Commissioner's appeal on 18 February 2026. Chief Justice Mortimer and Justices Beach and Horan all held the Tribunal had jurisdiction.

The judgment records that once the communication was characterised as a section 88 notice, the Commissioner accepted the outcome was inevitable, "because it was obvious, and accepted by the Commissioner, that the statutory preconditions for the giving of a removal notice had not been satisfied".

The evidence set out in that judgment is blunter than anything in the public commentary. At paragraph 16, the court reproduces the cross examination of eSafety official Mr Hannath:

"Is it correct that eSafety's policy is that taking informal or less intrusive action is preferred if it achieves the Commissioner's desired regulatory results? Yes.

In the context of this case, the desired regulatory result was that the applicant's post would be removed from Twitter and Instagram? Yes.

And that was the desired result, even though the investigator had concluded that the material in question was not cyber abuse material targeting an Australian adult? Yes."

The same witness told the Tribunal the Commissioner "sees her role as including being an advocate for complainants to assist them to achieve removal of material from social media platforms".

A few hundred requests a year, three or four lawful notices

At paragraph 15, the Full Court records evidence the Tribunal accepted: the Commissioner issues "a few hundred complaint alerts to service providers every year in relation to adult cyber-abuse material". Over the 12 months before the Tribunal's decision, she'd issued three or four removal notices.

A removal notice is the lawful instrument and it requires the material to actually meet the section 7 threshold, it creates a reviewable decision, and it carries appeal rights. A complaint alert carries none of that, and until Baumgarten sued, eSafety's position was that it wasn't reviewable at all.

The Full Court also had before it a record of what the Commissioner entered in X's portal in an unrelated matter. Under the field marked "Legal basis", her office had written: "Section 7 of the Online Safety Act 2021".

eSafety says it has changed its templates, and that it welcomed part of the judgment

eSafety's public statement on the case, issued in March 2026, says it has updated its complaint notification templates to make clear the communications are non binding, that it now relies more heavily on formal notifications, and that it will publish annual data on informal requests, which the Act already requires.

The statement welcomed Justice Horan's view that the Commissioner's functions "can extend to engaging with users and providers of social media and internet services by making requests that do not have immediate legal consequences". It confirmed the Baumgarten complaint fell short of the threshold, and that eSafety notified X anyway so the platform could consider it against its own terms of service.

In July 2025 the Full Federal Court dismissed an appeal by X Corp over an infringement notice about child sexual abuse material, with costs. X paid $650,000. The losses aren't spread across eSafety's work and they're concentrated in one category of speech.

Sarah Henderson says the crossbench bill would turn eSafety into a speech policing machine

Parliament is now being asked to lower the bar that stopped Inman Grant twice.

Australia's Voice senator Fatima Payman moved the Online Safety Amendment (Broadening Adult Cyber Abuse Protections) Bill 2026 on 3 March 2026. It implements recommendation 18 of the statutory review of the Act by Delia Rickard. It takes out the requirement that material be intended to cause serious harm, the exact words the Tribunal used to knock back the notice against Chris Elston, and drops the test to whether an ordinary reasonable person would think it was likely meant to have an effect on a particular adult, and whether the material is menacing, harassing or seriously offensive. It's sat at the second reading stage since the day after it went in.

Shadow communications minister Sarah Henderson told the Senate the high bar was deliberate, and that lowering it "risks converting a harm based safety regime into, potentially, what I would say is a speech-policing mechanism".

"Serious offence is not necessarily harm. Democracies can be noisy," Henderson told the Senate.

The Senate heard that Perth campaigners Caitlin Roper and Lyn Kennedy reported rape threats, death threats, doxxing and pornographic deepfakes to eSafety, and were turned away. Roper campaigns against video games that simulate rape.

Henderson's answer was that none of that needed a new threshold. Threatening to kill someone over a carriage service is already a criminal offence carrying serious penalties, she said, and the online safety scheme was never meant to cut across the criminal law. What the Roper case exposes isn't a bar set too high. It's an office that found a way to act three times against gender critical writers and couldn't find one for a woman being threatened with rape.

Henderson also told the chamber the Commissioner had been issuing informal notices "in approximately hundreds of cases every year" that don't comply with the law. The Coalition opposes the bill. Labor has had Rickard's report since October 2024, tabled it in February 2025, answered it in April 2026, and still hasn't legislated any of it.

Sarah Henderson wants the taxpayer bill, Lyle Shelton wants Inman Grant gone

On 25 February, Henderson called on Communications Minister Anika Wells to investigate how many removal notices had exceeded the Commissioner's legal powers, whether people were told of their appeal rights, and what the litigation has cost taxpayers. None of those figures have been published.

Family First national director Lyle Shelton went further on 8 August, calling for Inman Grant's dismissal and for the office to be abolished. "The Commissioner keeps trying to censor people raising legitimate concerns about gender ideology, and the courts keep telling her she has exceeded her powers," he said.

The pressure isn't only domestic. In November 2025 the chairman of the US House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan, wrote to Inman Grant asking her to testify in Washington, accusing her of being "a zealot for global takedowns" and arguing her reading of the Act "directly threatens American speech". She can't be compelled to appear.

Anika Wells has to decide on Inman Grant's job within months

Inman Grant has been eSafety Commissioner since 2017 and was reappointed in 2022 for a second five year term. That term expires in January 2027, which leaves Wells roughly five months to decide whether to reappoint her.

The office holds the only power in Australian law that forces content offline quickly, a point One News set out when Gina Rinehart was left with no regulator able to act over the ABC's video about her. That power works. The question the Baumgarten judgment raises is what happens the few hundred times a year that power isn't used, and a request that looks like it goes out instead.

Wells still hasn't legislated the government's April response to the Rickard review. Until she does, the threshold the Tribunal and the court applied to Elston and Baumgarten is the threshold that applies to Genevieve Gluck.