A Canadian free speech advocate who was fined by Australian authorities spoke out after the U.S. State Department appeared to come to his defense.
“It’s phenomenal. The Trump administration has been tremendous on this issue,” Chris Elston, popularly known as “Billboard Chris” for his custom of wearing sandwich boards with slogans on them, said.
In the Australian case, Elston had been fined $806 for “obstructing public movement” in response to displaying his billboard reading “children cannot consent to puberty blockers.”
Elston said he was peacefully conversing with members of the public and was issued a police “move on” order before being sent away.
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That incident was separate from a legal challenge Elston launched in April against the country’s eSafety commission after the government had his tweet of a Daily Mail article about a transgender activist seated on an Australian board.
“It’s such a zealous overuse of authority,” Elston said. “We don’t elect [officials] to decide what we can say.”
After he was censored, the case was included in a tweet from a State Department bureau decrying government censorship and their coercion of tech companies into targeting individuals.
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“Freedom of expression must be protected – online and offline,” it tweeted.
“Examples of this conduct are troublingly numerous. EU Commissioner Thierry Breton threatened X for hosting political speech; Türkiye fined Meta for refusing to restrict content about protests; and Australia required X to remove a post criticizing an individual for promoting gender ideology.”
“The United States opposes efforts to undermine freedom of expression.”
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Lois McLatchie Miller of Alliance Defending Freedom International, which has been defending Elston, said the group believes “everybody has the right to live and speak their truth, and Chris is a great example of that.”
“[W]e stood up with Chris alongside the Human Rights Law Alliance in Australia to defend free speech there, but we also see in my own country in the U.K., where people are having censorship thrust upon them, even being arrested for expressing their views.”