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A judge in Australia has lifted a ban on the social media platform X, allowing Australians to watch a video of a bishop being stabbed in a Sydney church. The temporary ban, which was imposed on April 22, was rejected by the judge who refused the application from Australia’s eSafety Commission to extend the court order, which was set to expire on Monday. Australian Federal Court Justice Geoffrey Kennett stated that he would provide his reasons for both imposing and lifting the order at a later date.
The decision marked a victory for the company, which was rebranded by billionaire Elon Musk when he purchased Twitter last year. X was the only social media platform that refused to remove the video of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel being stabbed. Musk has argued that he is standing up for the principle of freedom of speech, while Australian lawmakers have accused him of arrogance and of lacking a sense of social responsibility.
Musk posted on X after the ruling, stating, “Not trying to win anything. I just don’t think we should be suppressing Australians’ rights to free speech.”
X is also pursuing a separate court action against eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, a former Twitter employee, challenging the validity of her notice requiring the platform to remove the video of the April 15 attack in an Assyrian Orthodox church. The judge is expected to consider setting a hearing date on Wednesday.
Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones stated that the government might consider changing Australian law after reading Kennett’s reasons for removing his order, which required X to hide the video from users. “There’s a fundamental principle at stake, and that is, if you’re a company or anybody operating in Australia, then you’ve got to abide by Australian laws,” Jones said.
He also expressed support for Inman Grant’s stance on the video, stating, “She made the right decision in our view to ensure that that dangerous, violent, harmful material wasn’t being propagated online and encouraging and inciting that sort of behavior here in Australia.”
A 16-year-old boy was charged with terrorism-related offenses in the stabbings of the bishop and a priest who were injured in the attack.
X has geoblocked Australian users from accessing the content, but eSafety is seeking a worldwide ban on the video, which can still be accessed from Australia through VPNs. An eSafety lawyer, Tim Begbie, described X in court last week as a “market leader in proliferating and distributing violent content and violent and extremist material.”
Begbie argued that Australia could not be expected to conform to X’s “pro-free speech stance,” stating, “The fact is that that stance is in large measure illusory. Because X doesn’t stand for ‘global removal is bad’ in some pure sense.”
X lawyer Bret Walker countered, stating that X had taken reasonable steps to block the content from Australia but had encountered glitches. He described eSafety’s demand for a global ban as astonishing and the notice as invalid, stating, “You don’t expect to see statutes saying the Australian Parliament will regulate what concerning Australia — that is events in Australia — can be viewed in Russia, Finland, Belgium or the United States.”