This battle was by no means concerning the removing of a single violent video for Elon Musk – it was at all times going to show right into a glib tradition conflict fought with 4chan-style memes and late-night missives that includes Musk because the free speech antihero combating Woke Governments of the World. No less than, that’s how he needs to painting it to his greater than 180 million followers.
Musk on Tuesday responded to an interim courtroom order from Australia’s eSafety Fee requesting that X disguise graphic and distressing movies of the current Sydney stabbing inside 24 hours with a Wizard of Oz meme: it’s all shits and giggles over at X. In additional posts, he took goal on the eSafety commissioner, claiming she desires “authority over all international locations on Earth”, after labelling her a “Commissar” for requesting the removing of the video within the first place, which depicted an assault that the NSW police have since labeled as a terrorist incident.
Musk additionally discovered the time to mock the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, in between briefing his attorneys, to entertain and titillate his followers. If anybody desires to see a 16-year-old-boy allegedly assault bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel with a knife they need to rattling properly have the fitting to. Governments of the world be damned.
Musk would love us to consider that that is about freedom of speech. Besides it isn’t, at the least not in any easy sense if we take a look at his file: Musk routinely bans and censors accounts he doesn’t agree with. In 2022, for instance, he banned the accounts of a number of high-profile journalists from CNN, New York Instances and The Washington Publish who had been crucial of him within the press, and suspended the accounts of a number of journalists earlier this 12 months who had been crucial of Israel’s conflict in Gaza. He has additionally banned journalists who’re crucial of his corporations, typically with no rationalization and fired an worker for being crucial of his firm on X. In 2022, he banned an account monitoring the whereabouts of his personal private jet utilizing publicly accessible information, together with different accounts belonging to journalists who had retweeted that information – and banned the non-public account of {the teenager} who began it, Jack Sweeney.
The checklist might go on. Although he describes himself as a “free speech absolutist”, Musk’s strategy to moderation and censorship has been something however. These late-night tweet storms, banning sprees and ludicrous lawsuits are usually not designed to guard free speech, and even to uphold the US structure (which doesn’t and mustn’t apply to Australians anyway). They’re designed to silence his critics and entertain his followers.
One would possibly argue that Musk has each proper to make enjoyable of our legal guidelines and our authorities on his personal timeline and on his personal dime. He purchased the platform for billions of {dollars}, he can do what he desires over there. He additionally has the fitting to ban the accounts of individuals he doesn’t agree with and launch lawsuits if our authorities irritates him. Meme away. However the platform he took over is a world platform, and what occurs on it consequently impacts 421 million customers, 5.8 million of whom are Australian.
As we noticed throughout the aftermath of the Bondi assault final week when a false identify and identification of the attacker went viral on X and the fallacious identify even made it on to a Channel Seven report, posts on X can have real-world adversarial penalties on our soil. Likewise, extraordinarily violent content material has the potential to exacerbate misery and trigger riots or additional violence – as we noticed after the Wakeley assault when a riot broke out exterior the Sydney church.
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The video that Musk has been requested to take away depicts a violent terrorist act: it truly is that straightforward. The Australian eSafety commissioner has requested that or not it’s eliminated globally, and this can be a truthful and affordable request. Somewhat than complying, as Meta has performed, Musk has determined to go to conflict with the eSafety fee – ostensibly to defend his moderately warped understanding of freedom of speech, however actually to titillate his followers. Australians have each proper to be incensed by this.
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