Australia’s leader has called Elon Musk an “arrogant billionaire” in an escalating feud over X’s reluctance to remove footage of a church stabbing.
On Monday, an Australian court ordered Mr Musk’s social media firm - formerly called Twitter - to hide videos of last week’s attack in Sydney.
X previously said it would comply “pending a legal challenge”.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s criticism followed Mr Musk using a meme to accuse his government of censorship.
On Tuesday, Mr Albanese told ABC News that Mr Musk “thinks he’s above the law but also above common decency”.
Last week Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, an independent regulator, threatened X and other social media companies with hefty fines if they did not remove videos of the stabbing at the Assyrian Christ the Good Shepherd church, which police have called a terror attack.
They suspended journalists and researchers who posted the identity of a neo-Nazi cartoonist after he made a direct appeal to Musk for support. It was free-speech and not against Twitter’s terms of service to post the man’s name since it was newsworthy and already in the public domain, but Musk doesn’t actually care about free speech. He cares about the right to offend and say heinous shit without being shut down or ‘canceled.’ If you attack him or his allies (even the neo-Nazi ones) then he conveniently drops the free speech crusade
“Free speech for me, but not for thee.”
—Elon Musk