At a hearing examining a video of a bishop being stabbed, an attorney for the cyber regulator stated that while Elon Musk’s X has rules to remove dangerous content when it so chooses, it shouldn’t be able to disregard Australian law in determining what may be watched there.

An eSafety Commissioner decision to erase 65 tweets that show footage of an Assyrian Christian bishop being stabbed in mid-sermon in Sydney last month—an act that police have labelled a terrorist attack—is being contested by X, previously Twitter.

“X says … global removal is reasonable when X does it, because X wants to do it, but it becomes unreasonable when X is told to do it by the laws of Australia,” Tim Begbie, the lawyer, told a hearing of the Federal Court, Australia’s second-highest.

He added that other sites, including Meta, promptly removed the content upon request and that X has standards in place to remove really damaging information, much like responsible providers did.

However, he said, X’s resistance to the worldwide removal could not be justified since it would define what is “reasonable” under Australia’s Online Safety Act.

The firm Musk purchased in 2022, claiming to be dedicated to preserving free expression, claims to have prevented the postings from appearing in Australia, but it is refusing to take them down internationally, arguing that one nation’s laws shouldn’t govern the internet.

Begbie stated that the argument was more about the applicability of the Australian legislation that provides the regulator the authority to shield individuals from the most unpleasant information than it was about free speech.

The remedy X proposed, geo-blocking Australians, was unsuccessful, he said, because 25% of the population utilised virtual private networks to mask their locations.

“Global removal in these circumstances is a reasonable step,” he stated. “It would achieve what parliament intended, which is no accessibility to end users in Australia.”

Australian regulations, according to X’s attorney Bret Walker, gave room for interpretation over what constituted reasonable measures to shield the nation from objectionable information, but the Musk-owned business had taken appropriate measures.

“The idea that it’s better for the whole world not to see this obviously newsworthy matter, presumably to form their own views, and to consider the views of others … is in our submission a startling one,” he told the court.

“There should be much more than a ripple of apprehension that this country would take the approach that if this is the only way we can control what’s available to end users in Australia, then it’s a reasonable step to deny it to everybody on earth.”

Judge Geoffrey Kennett of the Federal Court has ordered the posters to be temporarily taken down while the case is pending. He decided to provide a final verdict on June 10th, but he prolonged the provisional injunction until this Friday.

(Adapted from ThePrint.in)