The Sydney church leader who was stabbed during a livestreamed service last week supports Elon Musk’s view that footage of the attack should remain accessible on X, a court in Australia heard Wednesday.
A lawyer representing the platform formerly known as Twitter claims Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel—a controversial Assyrian Orthodox leader who was allegedly stabbed by a 16-year-old boy—has written an affidavit arguing against the position of Australia’s eSafety commissioner, which ordered the removal of the graphic videos. “He’s strongly of the view that the material should be available,” Marcus Hoyne, an attorney for X, told a federal court, according to The Age.
The bishop was seriously injured in the attack at the Christ the Good Shepherd Church in the Sydney suburb of Wakeley on April 15. His alleged attacker reportedly cited Emmanuel’s previous comments about Islam in the moments after the assault. Australian authorities are treating the matter as a religiously-motivated terrorist act.
Disturbing footage of the incident spread quickly online, with the eSafety commissioner ordering Meta and X to remove the videos. X announced last week that it would legally fight the order to take down posts, saying the commissioner “does not have the authority to dictate what content X’s users can see globally.” Musk also slammed the commissioner as a “censorship commissar” who is seeking global “content bans.”
After X geoblocked specific posts—meaning they were unavailable to users in Australia without a VPN but accessible elsewhere—the federal court of Australia ordered X to hide certain posts highlighted by the commissioner. Justice Geoffrey Kennett then extended the order until May 10, when a full injunction hearing will take place. The existing order doesn’t pertain to all posts containing the stabbing video, but rather to 65 specific tweets flagged by the commissioner, according to The Guardian.
The case has led to an extremely public—and even personal—war of words between Musk and officials in Australia.
Anthony Albanese, the Australian prime minister, has branded Musk an “arrogant billionaire who thinks he’s above the law” and also “above common decency.” Speaking to Australia’s ABC, Albanese said the “idea that someone would go to court for the right to put up violent content on a platform shows how out of touch Mr. Musk is.”
“I’d like to take a moment to thank the PM for informing the public that this platform is the only truthful one,” Musk wrote in an X post Monday replying to some of Albanese’s earlier comments about the row. He subsequently claimed that the “Australian people want the truth” and X “is the only one standing up for their rights.”
The Tesla boss has also exchanged barbs with one Aussie senator who accused him of “absolutely disgusting behavior” in relation to the stabbing footage. Jacqui Lambie, who deleted her X account after criticizing Musk, said of him that “the bloke should be jailed.” Replying to a clip of her comments, Musk agreed with an X user that it should in fact be Lambie who is imprisoned. “She is an enemy of the people of Australia,” he added.
In a Facebook post Wednesday, Lambie said the Australian Federal Police had told the federal court “that ‘there is a real risk’ the video could be used to encourage people in Australia to join a terrorist [organisation] or undertake a terrorist act.” “Elon Musk should put his big boy pants on and do the right thing – but he won’t because he has no social conscience,” she wrote.
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