Elon Musk yesterday lashed out at Australia’s prime minister after a court ordered his social media company X to take down footage of an alleged terrorist attack in Sydney, and said the ruling meant any nation 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 Australia’s e-safety commissioner had said the content should be taken down since it showed explicit violence.
Photo: Reuters
“Does the PM think he should have jurisdiction over all of Earth?” Musk wrote in a post, referring to Australian 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.”
Musk 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 nations and nonprofits seeking more oversight of the content hosted on them.
Australia’s e-safety commissioner fined X A$610,500 (US$393,895) last year for failing to cooperate with a probe on anti-child abuse practices. X is fighting that penalty in court.
Albanese hit back at Musk, saying the nation would “do what’s necessary to take on this arrogant billionaire who thinks he’s 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 Australian Broadcasting Corp.
Although Musk wrote in another post that X had “blocked the content in question for Australian IP addresses,” the video could be seen on the platform by a Reuters journalist in Australia.
Alice Dawkins, executive director of Internet policy nonprofit Reset.Tech Australia, 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.”
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