A court ordered his social media company X to take down a footage of Elon Musk on Tuesday after he attacked the Australian prime minister. Alleged terrorist attack in SydneyAnd said the ruling meant any country could control “the entire internet”.
In an overnight hearing, Australia’s Federal Court ordered X, formerly known as Twitter, to temporarily hide a post showing a video of an incident a week earlier, in which a teenager was charged with terrorism for stabbing an Assyrian priest and others.
X said it had already blocked posts from Australian users, but Australia’s e-safety commissioner said the content should be taken down because it showed blatant violence.
Billionaire Musk, who bought X in 2022 with the stated mission of saving free speech, posted a meme on the platform in which X stands for “free speech and truth” while other social media platforms represent “censorship and propaganda”.
“Don’t take my word for it, just ask the Australian PM!” he wrote alongside the post.
In another post, Musk wrote that the company’s “concern is that if any country is allowed to censor content for all countries, which the Australian ‘safety commissioner’ is demanding, then what’s to stop any one country from controlling the entire Internet? ?
The pushback by the world’s third-richest man sets a new front in the battle between the platform he paid $44 billion for and countries and nonprofits seeking greater oversight of its content.
Last month, a US judge threw out a lawsuit by X against the hate speech watchdog, the Center for Countering Digital Hate. In Australia, the e-Safety Commissioner fined XA$610,500 last year for failing to cooperate with an investigation into child-abuse practices; X is fighting the fine in court.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese hit back at Musk, saying the country would do “whatever is necessary to deal with this arrogant billionaire who believes he is above the law, but also above common decency”.
“The idea that someone would go to court for the right to put violent content on a platform shows how out of touch Mr Musk is,” Albanese told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
Spokespersons for X and the e-Safety Commissioner were not immediately available for comment.
Although Musk wrote in another post that X made footage of the attack “inaccessible to Australian IP addresses”, a Reuters reporter in Australia was able to view the material.
Internet Executive Director Alice Dawkins said, “Pro-terrorist content is a particularly strange hill to die for, but it fits with the company’s chaotic and careless approach to the most basic user safety considerations that, under previous leadership, the platform took seriously. ,” said Alice Dawkins, executive director of the Internet. Policy Non-Profit Reset.Tech Australia.