The Australian online safety regulator has effectively abandoned its legal fight with X over the removal of videos of April’s Wakeley church stabbing attack, after agreeing with the social media firm to end a judicial review of its orders.
In April, the eSafety commissioner ordered X to hide 65 posts of the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel while he was giving a livestreamed service at the Assyrian Christ the Good Shepherd church in the Sydney suburb of Wakeley.
The commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, subsequently sought a federal court order to entirely remove the tweets after X only made them unavailable to Australian users and the company vowed to challenge the notice through the administrative appeals tribunal (AAT).
On Friday, the AAT made orders with agreement of both parties to resolve the proceedings. The office of the eSafety commissioner said in a statement that rather than test the interaction between the classification scheme and the Online Safety Act with this case, it was better to await the outcome of the review of the Online Safety Act due at the end of this month.
“The brief but violent footage shows what NSW police deemed a terrorist attack. There is always a copycat risk with this kind of graphic material, not to mention the damaging impact it may have on children,” Inman Grant said.
“So much time has now passed that there is no conceivable newsworthiness factor which could credibly outweigh the serious arguments for keeping the material beyond the ready reach of ill or malevolent social media users who could further weaponise it.”
The eSafety commissioner had abandoned the federal court case to have the tweets removed in June, after losing a bid to keep an injunction over the tweets until the case was heard. Inman Grant told Guardian Australia at the time that the AAT merits review was the appropriate venue to review the issues in the case.
The AAT case would have determined whether the video could be classified as “class 1” under the Australian classification regime, which encompasses “extreme violence material”.
In court filings, X had argued that the video does not meet that benchmark and argued the removal notice was invalid.
Inman Grant previously said an AAT ruling would give her investigators “operational certainty”.
“We did 33,000 investigations into illegal content last year, if we have to go to the Classification Board every time and wait 28 days or five days for an expedited review that would really hobble us,” she said.
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Musk has been critical of the commissioner and the Australian government over what he claims is censorship sought on the platform he bought in November 2022. Last month he labelled the Australian government “fascists” for the misinformation and disinformation bill that would enforce a code on the platforms to take action on misinformation on their services.
Guardian Australia reported last month one of the informal notices issues over the stabbing video tweet was one posted by the United Australia party senator Ralph Babet. Babet’s tweet remains online.
“No one, least of all a bureaucrat, should be attempting to censor a sitting Australian senator,” he said last month.
Last week, the eSafety commissioner scored a win against X, after the federal court dismissed X’s claim that the $610,500 fine issued over the company failing to answer questions on how it tackles child abuse on its platform did not apply to X because the notice was first issued to Twitter.
X had sought to claim Twitter ceased to exist when it merged with X in March 2023.
