Earlier this year, the Australia's eSafety commissioner took X to court over its refusal to remove videos of a religiously motivated Sydney church stabbing for its global users.
The case was ultimately dropped, but commissioner Julie Inman Grant says she received an "avalanche of online abuse" after Mr Musk called her the "censorship commissar" in a post to his 196 million followers.
[...]
A Columbia University report into technology-facilitated gender-based violence - which used Ms Inman Grant as a case study - found that she had been mentioned in almost 74,000 posts on X ahead of the court proceedings, despite being a relatively unknown figure online beforehand.
According to the analysis, the majority of the messages were either negative, hateful or threatening in some way. Dehumanising slurs and gendered language were also frequently noted, with users calling Ms Inman Grant names such as "left-wing Barbie", or "captain tampon".
[...]
Ms Inman Grant said that Mr Musk's decision to use "disinformation" to suggest that she was "trying to globally censor the internet" had amounted to a "dog whistle from a very powerful tech billionaire who owns his own megaphone".
She said that the torrent of online vitriol which followed had prompted Australian police to warn her against travelling to the US, and that the names of her children and other family members had been released across the internet.
[...]
The case turned into a test of Australia's ability to enforce its online rules against social media giants operating in multiple jurisdictions – one which failed after a Federal Court judge found that banning the posts from appearing on X globally would not be “reasonable” as it would likely be "ignored or disparaged by other countries".
In June, Ms Inman Grant's office said it would not pursue the case further, and that it would focus on other pending litigation against the platform.
X's Global Government Affairs team described the outcome as a win for "freedom of speech".
I'm quite conflicted about this.
I hate musk. Hate twitter. Hate that people were sharing videos of a terrorist attack.
That said, I suspect that this was something of a test case, with the regulator flexing their censorship muscle, and I'm glad it didn't work out.
It's also disappointing that her kids were doxxed, I don't condone that at all... but "just doing my job" is not a reasonable defence when you have a shitty job strategising how to corrode privacy.
This was a POV stabbing video that people spread around to glorify violence. It's in the same category as beheading videos.
America may have decided that child porn is the only media exception to free speech, but other more sane countries draw the line a little bit more broadly to include all forms of extremely violent crime filmed to be glorified, including things like murder, attempted murder, torture, and the rape of adults.
If you want to operate a business in places like Australia or New Zealand, you cannot be distributing violent gore videos within their borders.
I hope they revisit this as X users are pretty routinely celebrating things like the Christchurch shooting and other violent extremist incidents. Sometimes censorship makes sense, and when people are antagonistically spreading videos of people being maimed and killed, the "free speech" argument absolutely doesn't fucking cut it.
It's complex and I don't have the answers. My comment is merely hilighting the conflict between these 2 ideals... governments shouldn't whether or not specific content is ok, but companies shouldn't provide content which is clearly unacceptable.
If xitter didn't provide that content the government wouldn't have to intervene.
If the government does intervene it reduces the barrier for them to intervene in future.
I don't see how this is so difficult. Given the choice between a narcissistic billionaire or an independent, accountable government commission that's bound by the rule of law, I'll choose the latter every time.