TThe legal battle between Australia’s online safety regulator and Elon Musk’s company.
There have been previous skirmishes between Musk and eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant. Tensions escalated on April 15 after Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was stabbed to death during a livestreamed service at the Assyrian Church of the Good Shepherd in Wakeley, a Sydney suburb.
The next day, X was ordered to delete 65 tweets, including the video of the stabbing. When it chose to hide posts only from users in Australia, the Commissioner brought an emergency action seeking an injunction. A federal court subsequently ordered X to hide posts from users around the world pending a hearing on May 10th.
If the order is upheld, X could be fined more than A$15 million, or up to $782,500 per day, for each day the Tweet was kept online after the order was made. There is a gender. But the case represents a bigger test of regulators’ ability to force multinational technology companies to comply with Australian law.
“This is really the first real test of the eSafety Commissioner’s powers,” Australian Lawyers Union spokesperson Greg Burns said. “Her powers are quite strong in the sense that she can order the removal of material and can pay significant fines per day.
“But I think the limits will be tested because orders that purport to have global impact require cooperation from other countries.”
“X poses a challenge”
The idea of an eSafety Commissioner was first floated in 2013 when the Conservative Coalition Government came to power as a way to tackle online child bullying.
Shortly after its launch in 2015, eSafety’s powers were expanded to include image-based abuse and, with the passage of the Online Safety Act 2021, adult bullying.
At the time, critics argued that giving eSafety additional powers to regulate content according to the Australian Classification Code (a code written in the days of VCRs and still under review) would be a threat to freedom of speech and what people watch online. It warned that this could have far-reaching implications for what can be done.
However, for the most part, eSafety’s power usage does not cause much controversy.
Of the 33,000 reports of potentially illegal content received by the department in the last financial year, the eSafety Commissioner passed on about half as informal requests for URLs to be removed by platforms. According to the Commissioner’s Office, 99% of the cases involved child sexual abuse. He had only three formal notices related to violent content issued in the same year.
Source: www.theguardian.com
