Australia’s independent online safety regulator has suspended a bid from X (formerly Twitter) to remove a violent video.
On April 15, a priest was stabbed in Sydney, Australia, and like some other horrific incidents these days, it went viral online. Australia’s national regulator, eSecurity, demanded that all social media platforms take down the video. Although eSafety claimed that Meta, Google, TikTok and more removed it, X only blocked Australian viewers from accessing the video – something a VPN could easily bypass. When eSafety demanded that it be scrapped entirely, X CEO Elon Musk followed suit attack on free speech and argued that the laws of one country cannot govern the whole world, Registration informed.
Despite dropping the fight against X, eSafety reiterated its frustrations. “Our sole purpose and focus in issuing our takedown notice was to prevent these extremely violent images from going viral, potentially inciting more violence and causing further harm to Australian society,” eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said. “Most Australians accept that such graphic material should not be on broadcast television, which raises the obvious question of why it should be allowed to be available for free and 24/7 online to anyone, including children.”
Grant notes that X made a video that went viral linking this attack to two other stabbings. It also details the politics of violence X submitted to the European Commission last October as evidence that the platform should remove the video entirely. “…our service has clear rules that prohibit violent and hateful entities, perpetrators of violent attacks, violent speech, sensitive media, and synthetic and manipulated media policies,” the link reads. “For the avoidance of doubt, we strictly adhere to our illegal content policy and continue to remove illegal content, including terrorist content, from our platform.” In this sense, he calls the deletion of the video a “reasonable request” for X to make.
