Australia decided to drop a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s X over the removal of a video showing the stabbing of an Assyrian church bishop in Sydney.
Australia’s cybersecurity regulator dropped its lawsuit on Wednesday, June 5, after failing in federal court last month. In May, Judge Geoffrey Kennett rejected the e-Security Commissioner’s bid to extend an interim order for the social media platform to block a video of a church stabbing incident that Australian authorities labelled a terrorist attack.
Commissioner Julie Inman Grant announced that the regulator had decided to drop the legal action against X.
Most Australians accept this kind of graphic material should not be on broadcast television, which begs an obvious question of why it should be allowed to be distributed freely and accessible online 24/7 to anyone, including children.
Grant expressed concern about how easily children could access violent content on X. The commissioner said she initially sent X a notice to remove the videos to prevent “extremely violent footage from going viral.”
I stand by my investigators and the decisions eSafety made.
A 16-year-old boy faced terrorism charges for an alleged attack in April. The legal standoff sparked a heated debate between Musk and senior Australian officials. The dispute also dragged in Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese who called Musk “an arrogant billionaire.” In response, the X and Tesla CEO posted memes criticising the regulatory order, calling it censorship.
Other major platforms, such as Meta, TikTok, Reddit, and Telegram, erased the video after the removal request. X blocked Australian users from viewing the church stabbing posts but refused to remove them worldwide on the grounds that one country’s rules should not control the entire Internet.
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?
However, the regulator argued that geo-blocking Australians proved ineffective, as several users were using virtual private networks (VPNs).
