SYDNEY, April 23 — Elon Musk lashed out at Australia’s Prime Minister today after a court ordered his social media company X (formerly Twitter) to take down footage of an alleged terrorist attack in Sydney, saying the ruling meant any country could control “the entire Internet”.
At a hearing overnight, Australia’s Federal Court ordered X to temporarily hide posts showing video of the incident a week earlier, in which a teenager was charged with terrorism for knifing an Assyrian priest and others.
X said it had already blocked the posts from Australian users, but the country’s e-Safety Commissioner had said the content should be taken down since it showed explicit violence.
“Does the PM think he should have jurisdiction over all of Earth?” Musk wrote in a post, referring to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
The billionaire, who bought X in 2022 with a declared mission to save free speech, posted a meme on the platform that showed X stood for “free speech and truth” while other social media platforms represented “censorship and propaganda”.
He also wrote 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 pushback by the world’s third-richest person sets up a new front in the battle between the world’s largest Internet platforms and countries and nonprofits seeking more oversight of the content hosted on them.
Last month, a United States judge threw out a lawsuit by X against the hate speech watchdog, Center for Countering Digital Hate. In Australia, the e-Safety Commissioner fined X AU$610,500 (RM1.86 million) last year for failing to cooperate with a probe on anti-child abuse practices.
The platform is fighting that penalty in court.
Albanese hit back at Musk, saying the country would “do what is necessary to take on this arrogant billionaire who thinks he is above the law, but also above common decency”.
“The idea that someone would go to court for the right to put up violent content on a platform shows how out-of-touch Mr Musk is,” Albanese told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
Spokespeople for X and the e-Safety Commissioner were not immediately available for comment.
Although Musk wrote in another post that X had “blocked the content in question for Australian IP addresses,” a Reuters journalist in Australia could see the video on the platform. A far-right senator also reposted the video on his X account.
Earlier today, Facebook and Instagram owner Meta said it had used “internal tools” to detect and block copies of videos of the church attack and an unrelated, deadly stabbing at a shopping mall in Sydney two days earlier.
Meta said it was removing posts containing “any glorification or praise” of the incidents.
Internet policy non-profit Reset.Tech Australia’s executive director Alice Dawkins said Musk’s comments fit “the company’s chaotic and negligent approach to the most basic user safety considerations that, under previous leadership, the platform used to take seriously.”
— Reuters
