Elon Musk is currently battling government officials in Australia who want to force X to remove a video of a man being stabbed last week. An Australian court has ordered the video to be removed worldwide rather than just geoblocked in Australia. And while Gizmodo was highly critical of Musk’s poor content moderation decisions in the pastwe have to admit that Musk might be right this time.
The video at the center of this litigation was recorded during a livestream from Christ the Good Shepherd Church outside Sydney when a 16-year-old boy stabbed the church’s leader, Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, on April 15. The video is violent and unpleasant to watch, but not graphic in the sense that there is blood. Major US news outlets like NBC News Played the video without blurring or editing. Bishop Emmanuel, 53, survived the attack and said he was forgives the boy who stabbed him.
Australian news outlets also shared images of the stabbing, albeit occasionally with blur or at other times pause the video before the knife makes contact. However, Australia’s eSafety Commission called for the full video to be removed from X worldwide, and the Australian court hearing the case has done so temporarily agreed until a final decision can be made.
Musk screamed “censorship,” and while that’s an incredibly simplistic characterization of the entire ordeal, we’re inclined to agree with him on this one. The problem, of course, lies in jurisdiction. Can Australia dictate what users in other countries should and should not be allowed to do?
The Associated Press reports that the footage on X is being globally suppressed, although that doesn’t necessarily appear to be the case. The video is still available on some accounts, and it’s not clear whether these videos are an anomaly or whether X is simply violating the court order. X did not respond to questions emailed Tuesday.
Anyway, US-based news outlets are still showing the video on other social media sites like YouTube. What if the Australian eSafety Commission tried to remove clips from NBC News? How would we feel about it then? Be that as it may, the eSafety Commission asked Meta to remove the videos from Facebook and Instagram, which the company did without resistance.
X argues that Australia should not dictate the dissemination of information in other countries, even if the content is violent. And that seems reasonable, even if it pains us to admit that Musk is right.
“Although April 19th.
At the end of the day, this is all a judgment call about what type of content we want to see on a daily basis. There is no clear line that defines what is considered newsworthy and acceptable, even before things get complicated by international borders and local laws. Some of these decisions are governed by the terms of service of companies like YouTube, Facebook and while others host more graphic content.
I admit that I hate the decisions Musk has made at X since he bought the company when it was still known as Twitter. I stopped posting there again August 2023 after more than a decade as a heavy consumer, simply because I didn’t want to support the cesspool of hate and extremism it had become. I still watch it frequently just because there is still news that pops up from time to time. But many of the tweets on my “For You” page are currently just snuff videos. It’s uncomfortable and if I didn’t have to monitor it for work I would stop using it altogether.
But even though I follow the moderation guidelines of Again, there is overwhelming public interest in many of these terrible videos.
To be clear, Musk’s motives are anything but pure when it comes to “free speech” on X. Musk was more than willing to censor content at the request of authoritarian forces Türkiye and India and at the same time offers numerous explanations of local laws. But Musk is right to challenge Australia on this issue, even if he has lost support among traditional conservatives in the country. Peter Dutton, Australia’s most senior conservative politician, criticized Musk over the weekend and pointed out that X had been uncooperative in addressing child sexual abuse material on the platform.
“They allow pedophiles to spread images and videos of children being sexually abused through their networks. They are hindering the police investigation. “So there are a lot of aspects here that we have to deal with,” Dutton told Australian local television Australian Financial Report.
Dutton refers to an executive’s bizarre statement outraged by this content. The shocking statement didn’t get much attention in the US, but it was a big deal in Australia.
Australia should be subject to its own laws, which means it can decide when people in Australia can and cannot watch a particular video. But Australia can’t dictate what the rest of the world sees when most other countries consider such violent videos newsworthy. That’s a step too far, and while it’s strange to be on the same side as Elon Musk – a hypocrite with very few principles beyond his own self-interest – that’s where we have to end up in this case.