An Australian Senator has called for X owner Elon Musk to be jailed for life for refusing to adhere to the Australian government's demands to remove a video of the brutal attack on a Christian Bishop in Sydney last week by an apparent Muslim extremist.
After Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was attacked at his church in Sydney, the video taken from a live stream quickly went viral on X.
Australian officials, and politicians from both sides of the spectrum immediately called for the footage to be removed, yet Elon Musk has refused to do so, saying that X is a platform for freedom of expression and it will not censor content that is not illegal.
Australia's so called 'eSafety Commissioner' Julie Inman-Grant, an unelected official, has ordered both X and Meta to remove footage of the stabbing under the Online Safety Act, passed in 2021, which empowers the eSafety department to demand the removal of so-called 'class 1 material'.
X was ordered by the Australian Federal Court on Monday to block all users from viewing the footage.
The platform temporarily complied with the order in Australia while taking out a two-day injunction, but asserted that a global takedown order violates freedom of speech.
"We have already censored the content in question for Australia, pending legal appeal, and it is stored only on servers in the USA," Musk noted in an X post, warning that complying with government demands to ban content is a slippery slope.
In comments to Sky News, Independent Australian Senator Jacqui Lambie charged that Musk is "creating hatred" by ignoring requests to remove "harmful content."
"I think he's a social media knob with no social conscience, he has absolutely no social conscience," she said.
"Someone like that should be in jail and the key be thrown away. That bloke should not have a right to be out there on his own ideology platform and creating hatred, showing all this stuff out there to our kids and doing all the rest," Lambie added.
The Senator for Tasmania also declared she would be boycotting X, proclaiming "I'll be switching off X today, I'll be doing that before I get to the airport this afternoon, and I suggest that the other 226, there's 227 members of Parliament, do the same thing. Show him that you mean business."
Musk responded to the unhinged rant, noting "This woman has utter contempt for the Australian people," and later adding "She is an enemy of the people of Australia."
Musk has also been targeted by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese who has charged that Musk "thinks he's above the Australian law, that he's above common decency."
Albanese further asserted that Musk "is so out of touch with what the Australian public want. This has been a distressing time and I find this bloke on the other side of the world, from his billionaires' establishments trying to lecture Australians on free speech - well I won't cop it and Australians won't either."
Seems like Albanese is the one out of touch, given that as a result of the attacks on Musk and X, the platform has become the number one news app in Australia.
Meanwhile, Bishop Emmanuel is recovering from the attack and says he has forgiven his attacker, calling for his supporters not to retaliate over the attack but to behave "Christlike."
Did anyone ask him for his opinion on whether people should be allowed to see the footage?
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I visited the center of Berlin (a capitol of Germany) few years back. What I noticed was that the lampposts there were not useful for the purpose of fixing a democratic deficiency - they were all not straight and they had no horizontal part at the top - a rope would slide. I was wondering back then whether this was on purpose. Now that they build a huge ditches preventing enthusiastic crowds reaching the government and parliament buildings I think the design of the lampposts was not the accidental.
When the government is this corrupt, there can be no expectation of justice. Everything is slanted to keep the tyrants in power. Storm the Bastille.
