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.
The Commissioner's construction "would not sit comfortably with the Act's structure." "It would allow the commissioner, as has happened here, to create a standard and apply it to a provider who is already the subject of another industry sector code and effectively bypass the consultative industry-led model."
In other words, a regulator had built a route around the process parliament set up, and a court has closed it.
The Act, Raper found, is "founded on these siloed characterisations" of online platforms — a service sits in one category, not several. eSafety's lawyers argued nothing stopped a service falling into more than one. The judge did not accept it, and noted that on the Commissioner's reading "enormous overlap between the two sections of the industry would result."
The practical effect is that no social media service with messaging or chat sits under the standard. eSafety's own April 2026 guidance had claimed it for email, messaging, gaming and dating services, and social platforms with messaging. The last of those is now struck through.
The rest is not. Email and messaging providers, the services people actually use for private conversation, remain under the standard and under the obligation to scan proactively, alongside risk assessments, reporting, notice to eSafety of significant new features and two years of records. X is out.
The case is the latest round in a long fight. Inman Grant tried in 2024 to force X to remove a video of a bishop being stabbed in a Sydney church, not only in Australia but everywhere, and dropped the case; she has said she and her family received death threats over it, and that Musk called her an "unelected bureaucrat" and the "eSafety Commissar." In May the Federal Court fined X $650,000, plus $100,000 in costs, for failing to answer a transparency notice about its handling of child abuse material.
She has not conceded the standard. It "remains valid and enforceable", a spokesperson said, and "the court did not make a finding that the RES standard is invalid, as sought by X Corp." That is true. X asked for the whole instrument to be struck down and did not get it.
"eSafety is considering the judgment and next steps," the regulator said. Whether she appeals is unsaid.
