Melbourne, Australia — An Australian judge on Friday extended a ban on X from allowing videos of the assassination of a Sydney bishop in his church last month, after government lawyers condemned the media company’s argument social issues regarding freedom of expression to maintain the circulation of graphic images.
Australian Federal Court Judge Geoffrey Kennett extended his order that X Corp., the company renamed by billionaire Elon Musk when he bought Twitter last year, blocks users from sharing videos of the Twitter attack. April 15.
The attack led to terrorism charges against the alleged attacker, a teenager, and sparked a riot outside the church.
The order has been in existence since April 22, and Kennett will decide Monday whether it will be continued in its current form.
X is the only social media platform fighting a notice from the Australian eSafety Commission, which describes itself as the world’s first government agency dedicated to keeping people safe online, to remove video of the attack during an Assyrian Orthodox service broadcast online.
A bishop and a priest were injured but both survived.
Musk accused Australia of censorship and asked the Federal Court to overturn the eSafety notice. The court will sit on Wednesday to consider setting a hearing date for X’s application.
X has geo-blocked Australian users of the content, but eSafety says the video is still accessible from Australia via virtual private networks.
VPNs are services that allow users to access sites from other countries that are blocked in their own country. The regulator wants a global ban on video.
An eSafety lawyer, Tim Begbie, described X in court Friday as a “market leader in the proliferation and distribution of violent content and violent and extremist materials.”
Begbie said Australia could not be expected to conform to X’s “pro-free speech stance”.
“The fact is that this position is to a large extent illusory. Because X doesn’t mean ‘global suppression is bad’ in the pure sense,” Begbie said.
X’s own policies repeatedly reference the circumstances in which the platform will choose to remove content globally, Begbie said.
“The real position is: X says ‘reasonable’ means what X means,” Begbie said.
“Blanket suppression is reasonable when X does it because X wants to do it. But it becomes unreasonable when Australian laws require X to do it,” Begbie added.
X’s lawyer, Bret Walker, said X had taken reasonable steps to block content from Australia, but said there had been problems.
He called eSafety’s request for a global ban astonishing and the notice invalid.
“You wouldn’t expect to see laws stating that the Australian Parliament will regulate matters relating to Australia – that is, events in Australia – which can be seen in Russia, Finland, Belgium or the States “United,” Walker said.
“Not unless we want to become isolationist to an unthinkable degree,” Walker added.
ABC News
