Australia’s eSafety commissioner has dropped a legal battle against Twitter (“X”) head Elon Musk attempting to get the tech billionaire to remove a stabbing video from the platform. “Freedom of speech is worth fighting for,” wrote Musk on X. A video of a Muslim assailant stabbing Christian Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel on livestream during an April church service in Wakely, Australia went viral with millions of views. The attack on the bishop at Christ The Good Shepherd Church was officially deemed a terrorist act by police. Emmanuel is recovering from the knife wounds and asked his congregation to pray for his attacker. Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant threatened Musk with weighty legal fines if he did not remove the graphic video. She successfully got the court to order the videos to be hidden from X — but Musk refused to comply and said the order was invalid. When Musk didn’t take the video down, it became blocked in Australia. Inman-Grant at the time said she fears the video would inspire others to incite violence and the footage should be removed for users in every country. Musk scoffed and called her a "censorship commissar.”Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese backed Inman-Grant and called Musk an "arrogant billionaire".Australian Senator Jacqui Lambie ranted that Musk should be put in jail and the key thrown away for his refusal to comply with Australia’s attempts to censor the platform. .“After weighing multiple considerations, including litigation across multiple cases,” the commissioner said in a statement Wednesday released by the ASB (Australian State Broadcaster) she was dropping the legal case against Musk. She reasoned it was "likely to achieve the most positive outcome for the online safety of all Australians, especially children.”"Our sole goal and focus in issuing our removal notice was to prevent this extremely violent footage from going viral, potentially inciting further violence and inflicting more harm on the Australian community and I stand by my investigators and the decisions eSafety made," she said. The ASB noted the case was a test-run to gauge Australia's ability to enforce online regulation on international social media platforms. "This case has raised important questions on how legal powers can be used to threaten global censorship of speech, and we are heartened to see that freedom of speech has prevailed," the company’s global affairs department wrote on X. Inman-Grant told the ASB Australia should have the legal right to instigate the removal of content globally from platforms like X. "The idea of global deletion or wanting to 'globally censor' the internet is really a furphy,” said the commissioner. “The simple fact of the matter is with all of these companies, they don't have internet infrastructure or servers here, the only way you can remove that content is at scale, at the source, which is in California.”
