23-4-2024 (SYDNEY) An Australian court has mandated the social media platform X to conceal certain posts commenting on the recent stabbing of a bishop in Sydney, fueling an escalating confrontation between the company’s owner, Elon Musk, and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
In a late-night ruling on Monday (22 April), Australia’s federal court granted the country’s cyber watchdog, the eSafety Commissioner, a temporary two-day injunction, compelling X to obscure specific posts related to last week’s knife attack on Assyrian Church Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel during a service at his Sydney church.
The ruling marks an intensification of the war of words between Musk and Albanese, with the latter lambasting the tech billionaire as an “arrogant billionaire” for defying the Australian government’s demands to remove the contentious content on Tuesday.
While X had blocked the material for its Australian users, the platform maintained its refusal to censor the posts globally, asserting that the government lacks the jurisdiction to dictate what content its users can access worldwide.
Musk announced on Tuesday that X would appeal the Australian injunction, citing concerns over the precedent it could set. “Our concern is that if ANY country is allowed to censor content for ALL countries, which is what the Australian ‘eSafety Commissar’ is demanding, then what is to stop any country from controlling the entire internet,” the entrepreneur posted on X.
Videos of the assault, circulated online, depicted the assailant – a 16-year-old charged with a terrorism offence – being restrained by congregants while shouting at the bishop for allegedly insulting Islam.
The eSafety Commissioner had urged X to remove certain posts publicly commenting on the attack, potentially including video footage.
Justice Geoffrey Kennett’s order mandates X to block access to the specified posts until Wednesday afternoon, after which the matter will be revisited.
Albanese condemned social media platforms’ perceived lack of social responsibility, accusing Musk of fighting to retain violent content on his platform. “We’ll do what’s necessary to take on this arrogant billionaire who thinks he’s above the law, but also above common decency,” the Prime Minister told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Tuesday.
The clash escalated as Musk labelled the eSafety Commissioner the “Australian censorship commissar”, prompting Albanese to decry X’s resistance to removing violent material as “extraordinary”.
Musk retaliated by thanking the Prime Minister for “informing the public that this platform is the only truthful one”, while portraying rival platforms as vehicles for “censorship and propaganda”.
