Elon Musk asks in an X post if Australia’s ’eSafety Commissar has authority to...,’ after censorship demand across globe

SpaceX founder and Tesla chief Elon Musk has escalated his fight with an Australian regulator, demanding to know whether the country's “eSafety Commissar” should have authority to order censorship of content on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) beyond its borders.

Elon Musk, who termed Australia's eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant as the “Australian censorship commissar," in a post on X stated, “That is exactly the issue. Should the eSafety Commissar (an unelected official) in Australia have authority over all countries on Earth?”

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This censorship row gained momentum after an Australian judge on Monday, April 22, gave the judgement that social media platform X must block every user in the world from accessing the video of a bishop being stabbed in a Sydney church.

The move, as per Musk, has extended the prohibition on content beyond the geographical boundaries of Australia.

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Elon Musk last week announced that he would take up a legal battle against the order related to taking down posts on X that showed Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel being stabbed in an Assyrian Orthodox church on April 15. The video, widely circulated online, was geo-blocked in Australia, but could be accessed elsewhere around the world.

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Australia’s eSafety Commission describes itself as the world’s first government agency dedicated to keeping people safer online. The regulator applied to the Federal Court in Sydney for a temporary global ban on sharing the video of the knife attack on the Bishop.

Justice Geoffrey Kennett will hear the petition for a permanent ban on Wednesday, April 24, but till then the footage has been suppressed from all X users. The judge had ruled X has 24 hours to “hide” the footage from users.

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The regulator's lawyer, Stephen Tran, had said the footage was a “graphic and violent video” that would cause “irreparable harm if it's continuing to circulate" arguing that geo-blocking Australia was not equivalent to “removal” of the footage under Australian law.

Elon Musk's lawyer Marcus Hoyne said he "had been unable to get instructions from his San Francisco-based client because it was early Monday morning in the United States.”

(With inputs from AP)