The eSafety Commissioner has exercised further new powers under the Online Safety Act 2021, which saw her act to limit the spread of the horrific video and manifesto produced by the Buffalo terror attack shooter last month.
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said that under the Act, material that was assessed to advocate a terrorist act was considered Class 1 material and as such was subject to removal by the eSafety Commissioner.
“eSafety issued removal notices in relation to material hosted on eight overseas websites in the wake of the Buffalo attack on 14 May, resulting in material being taken down from four sites,” Ms Inman Grant said.
“In the interests of quickly protecting Australians from continued exposure to the material, eSafety made informal requests to Microsoft and Google to remove any links to the material on the remaining four sites from their search engines,” she said.
“eSafety then issued a formal link deletion notice to Google.”
Ms Inman Grant said links to the material on those sites had now been removed from both Google and Microsoft’s Bing’s search results pages.
She reiterated her sympathies to the families and friends of the Buffalo victims.
“This senseless act of violence claimed many innocent lives, and was planned and documented in the most deliberate and disturbing way,” she said.
“We are determined to do everything we can under the Act to protect Australians from exposure to this horrific material and to prevent it being used to promote, incite or instruct in further terrorist acts” Ms Inman Grant said.
