X vows to 'robustly challenge' Australia order to remove stabbing posts - Court order demanded the company remove some posts related to the stabbing of a bishop in Sydney.

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X vows to 'robustly challenge' Australia order to remove stabbing posts
Reuters (archive.ph)
By Reuters Staff
2024-04-20 21:19:30GMT

SYDNEY, April 20 (Reuters) - Social media platform X said on Saturday it would challenge in court an order from an Australian regulator demanding the company remove some posts related to the stabbing of a bishop in Sydney.

Police charged a boy, 16, with a terrorism offence on Thursday for the alleged stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel at a church in the New South Wales capital on Monday. Footage from the scene showed the boy restrained by the congregation and shouting accusations that Emmanuel had insulted Islam.

X's Global Government Affairs posted on Saturday that the Australian eSafety Commissioner had ordered it "to remove certain posts in Australia that publicly commented on the recent attack against a Christian Bishop".

The regulator demanded that X "withhold" the posts or face a daily fine of A$785,000 ($500,000), the company said, without giving details of the posts at issue.

It said, "X believes that eSafety’s order was not within the scope of Australian law and we complied with the directive pending a legal challenge.

"The eSafety Commissioner does not have the authority to dictate what content X’s users can see globally," X said. "We will robustly challenge this unlawful and dangerous approach in court."

Asked about X's comments, an agency spokesperson cited an eSafety Commissioner statement that it was working to ensure X's compliance with Australian law.

"We are considering whether further regulatory action is warranted," the regulator said.

The regulator, a government body that works to remove harmful online content, sent legal letters in March to social media platforms including X, demanding information about their efforts to stamp out terrorism content.

The bearded Emmanuel, bishop at the Assyrian Christ The Good Shepherd Church, is a social media star with followers around the world but also a divisive preacher. He has made fiery criticisms of homosexuality, COVID vaccinations, Islam and U.S. President Joe Biden's election.

($1 = 1.5584 Australian dollars)

Reporting by Sam McKeith in Sydney; Editing by William Mallard
 
Nah. They kicked out Huawei and cancelled 4 belt and road projects. China is not happy.
Are the Indonesian boat people still getting sent to Narau to sit and spin until the Aussies get around to doing something about them?
 
Why does Twitter care what a third world country has to say. Just ignore it lol?
As a global ad serving corporation, Twitter has offices and other assets all over the world, including in Australia, which they could seize. Or they could garnish revenue that would go to them from Australian advertisers, just as happens (most commonly in alimony/child support cases) in the US.
 
Right, and Elon is telling them to fuck off with that shit. They have no authority to have it taken down anywhere outside of Australia.
They can lawfully ask our ISPs to disrupt access, but getting around that is trivial.
 
They're now trying to order it taken down globally
australia thinks internet content should only agree by global consensus, I suppose? I mean they surely would be willing to delete whatever other countries tell them to, right?

it is actually kind of fun to think if elon were just a little bit misanthropic, he would totally comply and watch all the deletion requests tear apart the internet until it was unrecognizable.
 
Right, and Elon is telling them to fuck off with that shit. They have no authority to have it taken down anywhere outside of Australia.
You know, when the possessed Theoden mocked Gandalf about being powerless, he went and fucked up the fragment of Saruman that had poisoned the dude's soul with sheer willpower. What the fuck are the Aussies going to do considering even The Most Hated Forum on the Internet managed to tell the NZ police to fuck right off after Christchurch?
 
I'm on page 2 and nobody has archived and shared the video here, yet? I'm disappointed. But then people might be having the same problem I have which is that I can't find the actual tweet. What is the good of refusing to bow to censorship if not one article covering this actually links to the thing being censored? And I can't find it on Twitter. Anybody?
 
I'm on page 2 and nobody has archived and shared the video here, yet? I'm disappointed. But then people might be having the same problem I have which is that I can't find the actual tweet. What is the good of refusing to bow to censorship if not one article covering this actually links to the thing being censored? And I can't find it on Twitter. Anybody?
From what I've read, it's not about the stabbing video. It's about comments made about the stabbing incident in general. I may be misreading though. The West is absolutely terrified of vigilantes and the idea that the populace is willing to fight back because they realize the governments are toothless and ineffective.
 
Australian Leaders Demand Platforms Curb Online “Misinformation,” Float Online ID and AI-Assisted Content Surveillance Ideas
Reclaim The Net (archive.ph)
By Didi Rankovic
2024-04-22 18:04:54GMT

Australian politicians push for tougher social media regulations, with bipartisan pressure to combat "misinformation" following the Sydney stabbing attacks.
A number of Australian politicians, both those in government and opposition, are pressuring social media to demonstrate “more vigilance” when dealing with content related to the Sydney stabbing attacks.

This refers not only to mass censorship in the form of removing content designated as “misinformation,” but also to pushing for online age verification, with the incidents and the subsequent events utilized to give a fresh impetus to such broad policies.

And there seems to be a high degree of consensus, since the demands are coming both from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the leader of the opposition, Peter Dutton.

Albanese reacted by criticizing social media for not reacting fast enough to “protect users” and revealed he is “prepared to take whatever action is necessary to haul these companies into line.”

He was also upset that social media users posted – as they do – the videos they took of the incidents on their accounts “instead of forwarding it to the police.

Albanese spoke about the concept of a “social license” as something that social platforms are apparently granted in order to operate, and in line with this, must “start to understand their social responsibility.”

The prime minister previously described these platforms as a “scourge in many ways,” while the opposition, led by Dutton, brought up online age verification (digital ID) as one of the ways Australia can make its already highly controversial restrictive internet schemes even “better.”

Dutton wants new, and more stringent laws that would deal with “disinformation” and “misinformation,” and even boasted about his initiative to get the Five Eyes (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, US) to “exert pressure” on social media.

Dutton went for the excuse nowadays preferred by politicians trying to usher in more censorship – he explained the need for that pressure as a way to protect children online.

The opposition leader would also like to see AI “put to good use” by social media companies, namely to enable mass censorship, and is fine with harmless content getting captured in the dragnet.

“When they have that red flag, they should take it down. If there’s a hesitation of putting it up, if it’s an innocent graphic that they’ve caught, well they can rectify that…” is Dutton’s reasoning.

“Stronger laws” in the same context is an idea supported by Australia’s Agriculture Minister Murray Watt, who is also worried about “misinformation,” while Labor Minister Chris Bowen took aim particularly at X as “a cesspit of misinformation and violence” that “won’t be put up with.”

“We want to support the government (…) where it is effectively holding social media giants to account,” opposition foreign spokesman Simon Birmingham has said.

But Birmingham did add that they “don’t want a situation where the government sets up some regulator that has little control over removing that type of violent content, but ends up sitting in judgment about whether or not what people say in a political debate… is true or not.”
 
From what I've read, it's not about the stabbing video. It's about comments made about the stabbing incident in general. I may be misreading though. The West is absolutely terrified of vigilantes and the idea that the populace is willing to fight back because they realize the governments are toothless and ineffective.
Ah. I thought it was because you could hear him shouting a lot of Alahu Akbar and similar as they arrested him.
 
First place I saw the video was worldstar hip-hop. Granted, I don't have a  twitter X account.
 
I'm on page 2 and nobody has archived and shared the video here, yet? I'm disappointed. But then people might be having the same problem I have which is that I can't find the actual tweet. What is the good of refusing to bow to censorship if not one article covering this actually links to the thing being censored? And I can't find it on Twitter. Anybody?
Twitter complied with the order by geoblocking the content. Our government is saying that's not compliance and that the content needs to be removed altogether so that it is blocked globally.
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Footage of plenty of violent events is freely available for viewing in Australia, making this request for permanent suppression total over-reach.

Church footage.


The authorities have been perfectly content to use social media posts to identify and round up the rioters.
 
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I haven't seen this mentioned so I'll bring it up

Julie Inman Grant the "eSafety commissioner" whatever the fuck that is, is a former Twitter employee which would explain why they're going full retard over this shit. I hope Elon just bans all Australians and especially our politicians off twitter.

 
I haven't seen this mentioned so I'll bring it up

Julie Inman Grant the "eSafety commissioner" whatever the fuck that is, is a former Twitter employee which would explain why they're going full retard over this shit. I hope Elon just bans all Australians and especially our politicians off twitter.

It'd be funny if Musk were to invoke the "for any reason" clause to start banning any Aussie accounts pushing this line.
 
Musk targets Australian senator, gun laws in deepening dispute over X stabbing content
Reuters (archive.ph)
By Byron Kaye
2024-04-24 02:11:15GMT
, opens new tab
SYDNEY, April 24 (Reuters) - Elon Musk said an Australian senator should be jailed and suggested the country's gun laws were meant to stop resistance against its "fascist government", escalating his battle over a court order to remove video posts of a bishop being stabbed.

After Australia's federal court told Musk's platform X to temporarily stop showing video of a knife attack on an Assyrian bishop during a church service in Sydney a week earlier, Musk accused the country's leaders of trying to censor the internet, prompting an outpouring of condemnation from lawmakers.

One senator, Jacqui Lambie, deleted her X account on Tuesday to protest publication of the footage and called for other politicians to do the same, saying Musk had "no social conscience or conscience whatsoever". She added Musk should be jailed.

When an unnamed X user posted overnight that it was Lambie who "should be in jail for censoring free speech on X", Musk replied to his 181 million followers, "Absolutely. She is an enemy of the people of Australia".

A representative for Lambie, an independent senator for the small island state of Tasmania, declined to comment.

Targeting individuals is a regular strategy of Musk, the world's third-wealthiest person, as he goes after governments which try to exert more oversight of content on social media.

In Brazil, Musk has been singling out a judge who told X to block some accounts as part of an investigation into digital militias, calling him a "dictator".

Musk widened his attacks on Australia, including promoting a post from an unnamed but verified X user which said the country "disarmed all of their citizens in 1996 so that they cannot resist their fascist government", a reference to a gun buy-back and registration scheme after the country's worst mass shooting.

Musk responded with an exclamation mark.

Another anonymous, verified X account posted a screenshot of a text message purporting to be from a "friend living in Sydney", saying "Evil has penetrated Australia's government hard". "Whoa!" Musk replied.

Home Affairs Minster Clare O'Neill said social media companies created "civil division, social unrest ... and we're not seeing a skerrick of responsibility taken".

"Instead, we're seeing megalomaniacs like Elon Musk going to court to fight for the right to show alleged terrorist content on his platform," she added.

Police have charged a 16-year-old with a terrorism offence in the attack on Assyrian bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel. Videos online showed the attacker, restrained by the congregation, shouting at the bishop for insulting Islam.

Far right Senator Pauline Hanson supported Musk, saying the takedown order was the centre-left Labor government's "convenient excuse to increase their power to control what truths, ideas, information, and opinions you are able to share".

X and Musk have said they had complied with the temporary takedown order but would appeal it. The footage remained visible on X in Australia on Wednesday.

Another hearing to decide if the takedown order should be permanent was scheduled for later on Wednesday.

Reporting by Byron Kaye; Editing by Michael Perry
 
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