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
 
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This is the second time in a few weeks that Dutton has pushed back against nanny state shit. I really want Musk to take this all the way, though, because the scope of the eSafety Commissioner's power really needs to be tested by someone who won't give up when the legal fees start adding up.
 
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Sammich said:
I remember getting lit the fuck up on forums over 20 years ago by some of the most soul destroying bantz from strayans. What the fuck happened to you Australia!
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You can still find plenty of that attitude, tradies in particular are great for it IRL, but these days it's mostly kept in group rather than openly broadcasted because 'society' as a whole has just been raped by US cultural dominance and warfare for decades.

These days I think our culture is best described as USA lite (thanks to decades of US television and internet domination), weighted more towards the left side for a few reasons (we never really had the religious fundamentalism that still operates in the US, our 'blacks' also kinda suck but they aren't as disruptive, and we don't have the illegal immigrant problem, though the housing crises has FINALLY put the spotlight on out of control legal immigration). Other than being USA lite, with less conservatism, we have a twist of older UK humor (which is better than the USA's) running through our veins but also their propensity for loving a nanny state.
 
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repentance said:
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This is the second time in a few weeks that Dutton has pushed back against nanny state shit. I really want Musk to take this all the way, though, because the scope of the eSafety Commissioner's power really needs to be tested by someone who won't give up when the legal fees start adding up.
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This is 5 year old levels of transparent.
They demand a global takedown as cover to make their national takedown look "reasonable", when it's a press blackout on the same level as Tiananmen Square
 
AnOminous said:
I didn't mind it so much when your cuck country just cucked out and fucked you people up, but now your shitty cuck country is so cucked it's trying to cuck the entire world.

I wish we could nuke you.
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The British beat you to it.

Of course, they wound up dropping them on a place called "Emu Field", so my guess is they were targeting something other than the Australian people. There's a reasonable argument to make that the USA is not the only nation to deploy nuclear weapons in wartime.
 
Elon Musk’s X dodges Australian order to remove church stabbing video (archive)

Elon Musk accused Australia of trying to have "jurisdiction over all of Earth."​

ASHLEY BELANGER - 5/13/2024

An Australian federal court sided with Elon Musk on Monday, rejecting an Australian safety regulator's request to extend a temporary order blocking a terrorist attack video from spreading on Musk's platform X (formerly Twitter).

The video showed a teen stabbing an Assyrian bishop, Mar Mari Emmanuel—whose popular, sometimes controversial TikTok sermons often garner millions of views—during a church livestream that rapidly spread online.

Police later determined it was a religiously motivated terrorist act after linking the 16-year-old charged in the stabbing to a group of seven teens "accused of following a violent extremist ideology in raids across Sydney," AP News reported. Bishop Emmanuel has since reassured his followers that he recovered quickly and forgave the teen, Al Jazeera reported.

In April, Australia's eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, had cited Australia's Online Safety Act and asked X to remove 65 posts showing footage from the attack, Reuters reported, but X refused to remove the posts.

X owner Elon Musk said that Australia could not expect to enforce its safety law globally, accusing Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of attempting to have "jurisdiction over all of Earth."

"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?" Musk wrote on X.

Instead of removing the posts, X geo-blocked anyone in Australia from viewing the footage. Australia's safety regulator considered this inadequate because roughly 25 percent of Australians use virtual private networks to mask their locations online.

It also appeared unclear if X's geo-blocking was working as intended. A Reuters journalist in Australia reported that the video remained accessible without a VPN. And on a thread where some Redditors defended Musk for bucking the order, some agreed that X's attempt at geo-blocking appeared futile.

In his ruling Monday, Federal Court Judge Geoffrey Kennett did not explain why he denied the safety regulator's request to extend the temporary order. On Wednesday, there will be a case management hearing that could shed light on his decision. A final hearing on the matter is expected in the coming weeks, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC News) reported.

While X has notched a win today, there could be fines on the horizon. For failing to comply with the order, X risks fines under the Online Safety Act, as well as potentially contempt of court fines.

And it wouldn't be the first time X was fined for violating the law. Last year, X became the first platform fined under the safety law and was required to pay about $386,000 after failing to cooperate with the regulator's anti-child abuse probe on the platform, The New York Times reported.

Australia lawmakers resort to name-calling Musk​

After receiving the order to remove the terrorist attack video, Musk threatened to sue, but the safety regulator filed its complaint first, ABC News reported. Meanwhile, Musk failing to comply and criticizing Australia's government online triggered heated responses from several Australian lawmakers.

Australia's prime minister, Albanese, reportedly told local media previously that Australia "will do what is necessary to take on this arrogant billionaire who thinks he is above the law but also above common decency, and 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. Social media needs to have social responsibility with it. Mr. Musk is not showing any.” According to Reuters, the Australian government has already scheduled a "parliamentary inquiry to look into the negative impacts of social media."

Other lawmakers similarly jabbed at Musk as the standoff ensued. A government minister, Tanya Plibersek, called Musk an "egotistical billionaire," Business Insider reported, and a senator, Sarah Hanson-Young, joined the call for "stronger laws" to tax Big Tech corporations and contain "narcissistic" cowboys like Musk.

"Elon Musk is a narcissistic cowboy who thinks he can give the middle finger to the Australian government, because for too long we've had little to no regulation," Hanson-Young said. "We don't tax these guys. And they've been able to do whatever they want for far too long. It's got to come to an end."

X is hoping that Justice Kennett remains on Musk's side, but even a ruling in X's favor may not end the controversy. Australia's attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, has confirmed that his office plans to carefully examine the court's decision, ABC News reported.

X terms on removing terrorist content unclear​

Musk says this fight is all about stopping censorship, posting a meme that criticized other companies that complied with Australia's removal request, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, Snapchat, and TikTok.

The meme showed a young boy standing at a fork in a road, deciding between free speech and truth on X or censorship and propaganda on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Threads, TikTok, and YouTube. These are the choices that all online users face, Musk suggested in his post, writing, "don’t take my word for it, just ask the Australian PM!"

On X, the policy is to "limit dissemination" of content produced by perpetrators of terrorist or violent extremist attacks, including manifestos or content that shows their plan of attack. That includes the option to remove X posts, including "bystander-generated content of the attack as the attack is taking place, such as content that displays a moment of the assault or death, dead bodies, content that identifies victims, or content that depicts the perpetrator(s) conducting the attack."

X does sometimes make exceptions to its policies on hateful conduct and behavior when there's public interest. But X said on its website that it does "not anticipate cases where the public-interest exception would apply" to content promoting terrorism or violent extremism.

It's unclear if perhaps the public-interest exception applies in this case or if X simply considered limiting dissemination in Australia as appropriate to reduce harm from this particular attack.

X did not respond to Ars' request to clarify its terms.
 
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The Mass Shooter Ron Soye said:
Elon Musk is a narcissistic cowboy who thinks he can give the middle finger to the Australian government
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yes
the entire world can give a middle finger to your shithole prison colony
make cool movies and shut the fuck up about the world at large, or go get raped by emus until you die
🖕🖕🖕🖕
 
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The Mass Shooter Ron Soye said:
Bishop Emmanuel has since reassured his followers that he recovered quickly and forgave the teen, Al Jazeera reported.
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I cannot lie, while forgiveness is appropriate from the compassionate perspective, that it is Al Jazeera reporting on it seems hilarious.
The Mass Shooter Ron Soye said:
roughly 25 percent of Australians use virtual private networks to mask their locations online.
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God bless them, when 25% of Australians are "masking their locations" it's a sign the population as a whole are getting increasingly pissed.
 
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