Elon Musk’s X yesterday said it would fight an Australian watchdog’s order to take down content related to the brutal stabbing of a priest during a livestreamed Sydney church service.
Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was allegedly slashed in the head and chest by a 16-year-old suspect on Monday, sparking a riot by followers of the Assyrian Christian church in western Sydney.
The bishop has since issued a message from hospital saying he is recovering from his wounds and has forgiven his assailant.
Photo: Reuters
Video of the bloody attack, which spread widely on social media platforms, has been blamed by Australian authorities for feeding tensions in the community.
X’s government affairs department said it had complied with an initial eSafety Commission directive, “pending a legal challenge,” to remove “certain posts in Australia that commented on the recent attack.”
However, the social media platform said it later received a demand from eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant to “globally withhold the posts.”
X said it had been warned it faced a daily fine of A$785,000 (US$503,656) for failure to comply.
“The Australian censorship commissar is demanding *global* content bans!” Musk wrote as he reshared the company’s response.
“The eSafety Commissioner does not have the authority to dictate what content X’s users can see globally. We will robustly challenge this unlawful and dangerous approach in court,” X wrote.
X said the posts did not contravene its rules on violent speech.
The commission on Friday said it was working to ensure X’s “full and complete compliance” with Australian law.
“We are considering whether further regulatory action is required,” it said.
The authority said it was “disappointed that process has been unnecessarily prolonged rather than prioritizing the safety of Australians and the Australian community.”
“I’m shocked, but I’m not surprised,” New South Wales Premier Chris Minns said yesterday when asked about X’s statement.
“That is exactly what I would expect from X or Twitter or whatever you want to call it: a disregard for the information that they have pumped into our communities, lies and rumors spreading like wildfire,” Minns said. “And when things go wrong, throwing their hands up in the air to say they’re not prepared to do anything about it.”
Minns called for a strengthening of the rules governing social media companies.
“We have had enough. Sydney has had enough,” he said.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS