X has lost a legal battle in which the company tried to avoid a $400,000 fine by claiming that Twitter no longer exists in Australia. Creative legal argument, first ArsTechnicaIt comes amid a more than year-long dispute with the Australian e-Security Commission.
The commission asked the company, then known as Twitter, last February to provide details of child sexual exploitation on the platform. In his response, X failed to answer a number of questions and “left some sections completely blank,” the commission said in a statement. . As a result, the eSecurity Commission fined the company more than $415,000 for noncompliance.
It was X’s attempt to fight the fine that led to the claim that Twitter should not be held liable because it “ceased to exist”. From lawsuit:
X Corp submitted that as of March 15, 2023, Twitter Inc. ceased to be a person and therefore ceased to be a social media service provider. It said that Twitter Inc. therefore lacks the ability to enforce the notice and X Corp. does not have to make any report in place of Twitter Inc. because X Corp. is not the same person as the service provider to whom the notice was issued.
This argument is not entirely new for the company owned by Elon Musk. CEO Linda Yaccarino has also repeatedly claimed that X is a “new company” to avoid scrutiny. He repeated the line many times earlier this year In the Senate hearings on child safety issues.
Australian federal judge Michael Wheelahan found the claim convincing, saying X’s argument required “leaps of logic not supported by adequate explanation”. X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In e-Security Commissioner Inman Grant welcomed the decision. “If X Corp’s argument were to be accepted by the Court, it would set a precedent that a merger of a foreign company with another foreign company could allow it to avoid regulatory obligations in Australia,” Grant said.
