Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/13351707
Australia’s prime minister has labelled X’s owner, Elon Musk, an “arrogant billionaire who thinks he is above the law” as the rift deepens between Australia and the tech platform over the removal of videos of a violent stabbing in a Sydney church.
On Monday evening in an urgent last-minute federal court hearing, the court ordered a two-day injunction against X to hide posts globally containing the footage of the alleged stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel on 15 April. The eSafety commissioner had previously directed X to remove the posts, but X had only blocked them from access in Australia pending a legal challenge.
Anthony Albanese on Tuesday said Musk was “a bloke who’s chosen ego and showing violence over common sense”.
“Australians will shake their head when they think that this billionaire is prepared to go to court fighting for the right to sow division and to show violent videos,” he told Sky News. “He is in social media, but he has a social responsibility in order to have that social licence.”
“What the eSafety commissioner is doing is doing her job to protect the interests of Australians. 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,” he said.
Musk is an ass, but this is a complex issue that goes way beyond Australia. Many govts are censoring content on social media within their countries. The last thing they need is precedent allowing them to remove videos from a platform entirely worldwide.
Yeah it’s a rare day that I side with Elon Musk but this just happens to be one of those days. Australia shouldn’t get to dictate what doesn’t get shown to people outside of their authority.
Musk is happy to censor at the request of other far less democratic nations, of course.
It’s also a question of methods; a giant company simply ignoring an unjust law is typically a pretty poor way to challenge it (as always, there are exceptions). To the extent that Australia is claiming that Musk sees himself as above the law, that’s a pretty accurate charge, that holds whether the particular law in question is just or not.
Shorter version: fuck Musk, and also fuck countries claiming they can order takedowns beyond their borders. Both can be true at once.