Elon Musk's X will no longer have to censor and block videos depicting an Assyrian church bishop getting stabbed after a local court blocked a bid that looks to extend the order, Reuters reports.
Judge Geoffrey Kennett of the Federal Court announced that the request to prolong the injunction issued last month had been turned down. During a quick hearing, the judge stated that the grounds for the decision would be made public later.
A hearing on the subject has been scheduled for this Wednesday. Senior Australian authorities, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, have become embroiled in a heated legal battle between Musk and them.
Albanese referred to Musk as "an arrogant billionaire" when he objected to the video being taken down. Musk has expressed his disapproval of the regulatory directive through memes, calling it censorship. When questioned, other platforms like Meta promptly removed the content.
Musk's X recently told a court that it was unreasonable for Australia's eSafety commissioner to expect the 65 posts to be taken down globally and contested the validity of letters requiring the firm to remove tweets containing videos of the stabbing attack at a Sydney church.
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Musk's Challenge
The notice, reportedly according to X's lawyer Bret Walker SC, was "manifestly inadequate" in that it failed to offer enough information about the factors considered by the eSafety officer who decided to order the deletion of the material, even though the content was categorized as "class 1" under Australian classification law. X did not believe the notice to be legitimate. A judge heard the case on Friday.
The second-highest court in Australia, the Federal Court, upheld an order issued by the eSafety Commissioner last month directing X, the former Twitter, to remove 65 posts that featured footage of a bishop being stabbed during a sermon in Sydney on April 15, citing explicit violence.
For the purported attack, a 16-year-old kid has been charged with terrorism. The posts are no longer visible to Australian users, but X has declined to take them down globally, arguing that the laws of one nation shouldn't govern the internet.
Tim Begbie KC, the eSafety commissioner's attorney, told the court that the decision document reflected the important considerations the decision-maker had considered.
Begbie stated that eSafety was given a 28-day period to present a comprehensive justification for the ruling via the distinct review procedure X initiated at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
Begbie contended that rather than being about freedom of speech, the case at hand was about protecting Australians from danger and enforcing the Online Safety Act.
X Content Moderation in Europe
On the other hand, Musk's X is still in legal hot water after the European Union (EU) recently demanded that the platform explain a decrease in content moderation resources, citing worries about misinformation in advance of the June European elections.
This action is a component of the EU's X investigation, which was started in December by laws intended to prevent unlawful internet content.
Comparably, the EU has opened an investigation into Meta's Instagram and Facebook accounts because of concerns that they are not taking adequate action to thwart misinformation.
The European Commission has stated that X needs further details on its resources and content moderation efforts.
This request comes in the wake of X's April transparency report, which showed that the team of content moderators had shrunk by about 20% from the October 2023 report.
Furthermore, X has reduced the number of languages spoken in the EU from eleven to seven.
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(Photo: Tech Times)
