Elon Musk has stepped up his war of words with the Australian government over demands the X social media platform remove videos of the stabbing of a Sydney bishop, as the controversy around violent content spirals into a wider free speech debate.
The eccentric billionaire has been publicly feuding Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant for the past week over what he has characterised as an “attempt to censor the entire world”.
“The Australian people want the truth,” Musk wrote on Tuesday, sharing a post stating that X had become the most downloaded news app in Australia. “X is the only one standing up for their rights.”
Mr Albanese had earlier blasted the Tesla chief executive as “arrogant” and someone who “thinks he’s above Australian law”, while Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie — prior to shutting down her X account — suggested he was a “friggin’ disgrace” who “should be in jail”.
“This woman has utter contempt for the Australian people,” Musk responded.
Chris Pavlovski, chief executive of Rumble, said the alternative video platform “stands united” with Musk and X.
“Australia has made clear they believe in stripping away human rights (freedom of expression) in order to satisfy what they deem appropriate for your eyes and ears,” Mr Pavlovski wrote on Tuesday.
“Australia is officially NOT a free country.”
It comes after the federal court on Monday ordered X to temporarily hide any posts depicting graphic footage of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel being attacked during a sermon being live-streamed on YouTube.
The horrifying stabbing, allegedly by a 15-year-old terrorist shouting “Allahu Akbar”, sparked a violent riot as up to 2000 people descended on the Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley in the city’s west on April 15, injuring a number of officers and damaging police vehicles.
The eSafety Commissioner on Monday won a two-day interim legal injunction after last week ordering X and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to take down the material.
From Wednesday at 5pm, if X fails to comply with the injunction it could face fines of up to $550,000 per day.
While Meta complied, X said it would comply in the interim but would launch legal action.
That prompted the eSafety Commissioner to go to federal court, arguing X had failed to fully comply with the law because it was geoblocking the content rather than deleting it, meaning the content could not be viewed in Australia but could be seen elsewhere.
If a person in Australia uses a virtual private network, which hides their location, they can view the content. Lawyers for the eSafety Commissioner argued geoblocking did not go far enough to comply with the Online Safety Act.
But lawyers for X sought a delay, saying they had not yet been able to seek instructions from their client.
Justice Geoffrey Kennett granted a temporary injunction for two days, meaning X must hide the posts until the matter returns to court on Wednesday when lawyers can argue against the injunction before a final decision is made.
Musk earlier shared a clip of Daniel Wild, deputy executive director of the Institute of Public Affairs, speaking to Sky News Australia host Rita Panahi last week.
“The problem you’ve got here with this eSafety Commissioner is she’s an activist,” Wild said in the clip, which has now been viewed 23 million times.
“She will continue to expand her role to police the internet, to censor debate in a way that’s consistent with her ideological views … you have these unelected bureaucrats with vague powers and they will fill it with their views. She has a track record of censorship and it only ever targets one side, and unfortunately we’re seeing that happen again.”
Musk commented, “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? We have already censored the content in question for Australia, pending legal appeal, and it is stored only on servers in the USA.”
In another post he wrote, “Should the eSafety Commissar (an unelected official) in Australia have authority over all countries on earth?”
Dr Dana McKay, Associate Dean of Interaction, Technology and Information in the School of Computing Technologies at RMIT, said on Tuesday that “not all censorship is bad when it is applied to situations like graphic and illegal content”.
“There are a range of things that we, as a society, agree shouldn’t be posted online,” she said in a statement.
“These platforms promote content that gets more engagement — be it reactions, views or shares — and this increases the risk that users could see certain types of content without wanting to. In the case of violent material, this could have severe negative consequences for people’s mental health, especially if they have experienced serious violence themselves which it is estimated up to 41 per cent of Australians have.”
While the Coalition has joined forces with Labor in a bipartisan push to force social media giants like X to comply with Australian law, some conservatives have publicly voiced support for Musk.
Nationals Senator Matt Canavan suggested the reaction to the stabbing video was “confected outrage” being used “to pursue other agendas”.
“The PM seems more upset about a video of a Christian Bishop being attacked than the ACTUAL act of a Christian Bishop being attacked. SHAMEFUL!” he wrote on X.
United Australia Party Senator Ralph Babet wrote, “Let’s be very clear, the government does not care about Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel. They care about taking down X as X poses a threat to their control of information and narratives. The government and their bureaucrats themselves are regular spreaders of misinformation.”
2GB host Ben Fordham said on Tuesday that the PM was trying to argue the video of the church attack “is a case of people spreading misinformation”.
“But the video is real,” he said.
“It’s got nothing to do with misinformation or disinformation. When something terrible like this happens it is natural that some people will want to see what happened, and if you censor or cancel the video evidence you encourage conspiracy theories. Yes we need to keep kids away from viewing this stuff, but that’s why children don’t belong on social media sites like X.”
On Monday, the Coalition decreed Musk had to “comply with Australian law” after the federal government flagged tougher laws to crack down on social media giants to force them to remove violent content and misinformation.
Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones said X had become a “playground for criminals and cranks” and a “factory for trolls and bots and misinformation”, and vowed to “fight” the social media giant.
The Coalition’s communications spokesman, David Coleman, said X had to play by the rules.
“We know we can’t rely on social media companies … we can’t trust them,” he said.
“This material [from the stabbings] is really disturbing content, and not only are adults seeing it, but kids are. That’s why the Online Safety Act is so important for the Commissioner to say that’s not acceptable.”
Calls to enforce tougher penalties on tech companies have grown after distressing images of the livestreamed stabbing of the Assyrian bishop and a knife attack in Bondi Junction two days earlier have been widely accessed across social media sites.
The unrelated incidents have sparked debate about the spread of misinformation after false claims about each attacker’s motive and identity rapidly circulated online.
Mr Albanese said companies had a “social responsibility” to remove the content if requested by the eSafety Commissioner.
“I find it extraordinary that X chose not to comply and are trying to argue their case,” he told reporters in Mackay.
“This isn’t about freedom of expression. This is about the dangerous implications that can occur when things that are simply not true are replicated and weaponised in order to cause division and, in this case, to promote negative statements and potentially to just inflame what was a very difficult situation.”
On Sunday, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton left the door open to backing the misinformation laws he previously described as “Orwellian” if they struck the right balance.
Foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham reiterated his party would back moves to “put in place the types of powers or penalties that make social media companies pay attention”.
“The idea that it is ‘censorship’ to say that imagery of a terrorist attack, of a stabbing incident, should not be able to be broadcast in an unfiltered way for all to see, children to access and otherwise, is an insulting and offensive argument,” he told the ABC.
Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young likened Musk to a “cowboy” in the “wild west online”.
“The problem we have is that for far too long these big tech giants have gotten away with little to no regulation … no wonder they think they can give a middle finger to the government,” she told the ABC.
“It is the wild west online and it’s just not on … no wonder that cowboys like Elon Musk think that they can keep on making money and profiting off outrage and hatred.”
frank.chung@news.com.au
— with NCA NewsWire
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