Censorship Wars: Elon Musk, Safety Commissioners and Violent Content
The attitudes down under towards social media have turned barmy. While there is much to take Elon Musk to task for his wrecking ball antics at the platform formerly known as Twitter, not to mention his highly developed sense of sociopathy, the hysteria regarding the refusal to remove images of a man in holy orders being attacked by his assailant in Sydney suggests a lengthy couch session is in order. But more than that, it suggests that the censoring types are trying, more than ever, to tell users what to see and under what conditions for fear that we will all reach for a weapon and go on the rampage.
It all stems from the April 15 incident that took place at an Assyrian Orthodox service conducted by Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and the Rev. Isaac Royel at Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley, Sydney. A 16-year-old youth, captured on the livestream of the surface, is shown heading to the bishop before feverishly stabbing him, speaking Arabic about insults to the Prophet Muhammed as he does so. Rev. Royel also received injuries.
Up to 600 people subsequently gathered around the church. A number demanded that police surrender the boy. In the hours of rioting that followed, 51 police officers were injured. Various Sydney mosques received death threats.
The matter – dramatic, violent, raging – rattled the authorities. For the sake of appearance, the heavies, including counter-terrorism personnel, New South Wales police and members of the Australian domestic spy agency, ASIO, were brought in. The pudding was ready for a severe overegging. On April 16, the NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb deemed the stabbing a “terrorist incident”. NSW Premier Chris Minns stated that the incident was being investigated as a “terrorist incident” given the “religiously motivated” language used during the alleged attack.
After conducting interviews with the boy while still in his hospital bed on April 18, the decision was made to charge him with the commission of an alleged act of terrorism. This, despite a behavioural history consistent with, as The Guardian reports, “mental illness or intellectual disability.” For their part, the boy’s family noted “anger management and behavioural issues” along with his “short fuse”, none of which lent themselves to a conclusion that he had been radicalised. He did, however, have a past with knife crime.
Assuming the general public to be a hive of incipient terrorism easily stimulated by images of violence, networks and media outlets across the country chose to crop the video stream. The youth is merely shown approaching the bishop, at which point he raises his hand and is editorially frozen in suspended time.
Taking this approach implied a certain mystification that arises from tampering and redacting material in the name of decency and inoffensiveness; to refuse to reveal such details and edit others, the authorities and information guardians were making their moralistic mark. They were also, ironically enough, lending themselves to accusations of the very problems they seek to combat: misinformation and its more sinister sibling, disinformation.
Another telling point was the broader omission in most press reporting to detail the general background of the bishop in question. Emmanuel is an almost comically conservative churchman, a figure excommunicated for his theological differences with orthodoxy. He has also adopted fire and brimstone views against homosexuality, seeing it as a “crime in the eyes of God”, attacked other religions of the book, including Judaism and Islam, and sees global conspiracies behind the transmission of COVID-19. Hardly, it would seem, the paragon of mild tolerance and calm acceptance in a cosmopolitan society.
On April 16, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, got busy, announcing that X Corp and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, had been issued with legal notices to remove material within 24 hours depicting “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact and detail.” The material in question featured the attack at the Good Shepherd Church.
Under the Online Safety Act 2021 (Cth), the commissioner is granted various powers to make sure the sheep do not stray. Internet service providers can be requested or required to block access to material that promotes abhorrent violent conduct, incites such conduct, instructs in abhorrent violent conduct or depicts abhorrent violent conduct. Removal of material promoting, instructing, or depicting such “abhorrent violent conduct”, including “terrorist acts” can be ordered for removal if it risks going “viral” and causing “significant harm to the Australian community.”
X took a different route, preferring to “geoblock” the content. Those in Australia, in other words, would not be able to access the content except via such alternative means as a virtual private network (VPN). The measure was regarded as insufficient by the commissioner. In response, a shirty Musk dubbed Grant Australia’s “censorship commissar” who was “demanding global content bans”. On April 21, a spokesperson for X stated that the commissioner lacked “the authority to dictate what content X’s users can see globally. We will robustly challenge this unlawful and dangerous approach in court.”
The Australian censorship commissar is demanding *global* content bans! https://t.co/CRLglUYYIG
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 19, 2024
In court, the commissioner argued that X’s interim measure not to delete the material but “geoblock” it failed to comply with the Online Safety Act. Siding with her at first instance, the court’s interim injunction requires X to hide the posts in question from all users globally. A warning notice is to cover them. The two-day injunction gives X the opportunity to respond.
There is something risible in all of this. From the side of the authorities, Grant berates and intrudes, treating the common citizenry as malleable, immature and easily led. Spare them the graphic images – she and members of her office decide what is “abhorrent” and “offensive” to general sensibilities.
Platforms such as Meta and X engage in their own forms of censorship and information curation, their agenda algorithmically driven towards noise, shock and indignation. All the time, they continue to indulge in surveillance capitalism, a corporate phenomenon the Australian government shows little interest in battling. On both sides of this coin, from the bratty, petulant Musk, to the teacherly manners of the eSafety Commissioner, the great public is being mocked and infantilised.
Like what we do at The AIMN?
You’ll like it even more knowing that your donation will help us to keep up the good fight.
Chuck in a few bucks and see just how far it goes!
Your contribution to help with the running costs of this site will be gratefully accepted.
You can donate through PayPal or credit card via the button below, or donate via bank transfer: BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969
14 comments
Login here Register here-
leefe -
Douglas Pritchard -
Pete -
Bryony Fearn -
paul walter -
Terence Mills -
Canguro -
Terence Mills -
Clakka -
Canguro -
paul walter -
GL -
Centrelink customer -
Clakka
Return to home pageNah, this is probably noot the best hill on which to die over the censorship issue.
Also, while that bishop is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, that does not justify or excuse the attack.
This reminds me of someone who was intent on shirtfronting Putin.
Or getting Assange back to his home.
Pushing **** uphill with a pointy stick.
Orwell’s 1984 was a prequel to Inman’s 2024 it seems. e-Commisioner Inman of the Ministry of Truthers, your one truish source of misinfo, and we care. No joke. Musk, linked to the origins of Technocracy, is smart enough to understand how dead the world will become if people surrender their right to free speech / independence of thought to control freak bureaucrats who want to treat ‘their public’ as children. What’s going to happen when the Liberals are back in power and in control of an e-Commissioner? Hint – shut up peasants.
I would rather content be circulated than have others decide on a grand scale, what I or thee can read or watch, especially if affiliated with governments & able to control the content of millions. It’s incredibly Orwellian.
It’s a very dangerous step toward censorship, control & manipulation.
I’m with Musk on this one.
Right behind Musk.
So fed up with the relentless on-ward march of censorship and dumbing down. this century.
The final straws have been Gaza and the ABC.
We must desperately fight to stay clear of the cesspit of Mainstream Media.
The final laugh today was an enviro minister in a fossil fuel corrupt country attacking a man who developed the first electric car to go commercial in a global warming era
Musk, Zuckerberg and others have stridently argued that they are not publishers, that they do not censor what goes up on their sites, that they are merely a platform. Clearly they don’t want to start editing or censoring as that would inevitably label them as a publisher and that brings with it all sorts of responsibilities and liabilities : just ask Rupert Murdoch !
It may take a few more legal tussles but, in my view, these social networks will ultimately be classed as publishers and will be held to account for what they publish and make them subject to regulation and defamation laws.
Ah, censorship… where would we be without it? Nanny states have form with their respective levels of determination around the subject of what the punters can and can’t be allowed to view, read, or listen to. D.H.Lawrence’s 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned for obscenity in the United States, Canada, Australia, India and Japan, whether for the sin of depicting a relationship between an upper class woman and a working class man, or its explicit descriptions of sex; nonetheless, the censors were bothered enough to form the view that the public would not be well served by allowing them into this world of love & lust as depicted by Lawrence. Banned in Australia cites 16,000 literary publications banned between the 1930s and 1970s… clearly, the nannyism at play was deeply determined to mould the malleable psyches of the Australian people into something approaching bland conformism to a centralised set of moral norms.
Tracking along a parallel line of thinking, the same can be said of what we are allowed to view. As is usually the case, banned films eventually become unbanned, whether through a revision of view of what passes as acceptable or perhaps simply a change in the censor’s chair from the blue-rinsed frigid churchgoing critics of everything to someone with a passing understanding that adults can usually handle matters of controversy and don’t need nannying and hectoring restrictions place in their way with respect to choices.
The hot potato of what ought to be allowed and what ought not to be has well and truly jumped from the baking tray and onto the bench now that the internet has been let loose on the global society. The disgusting reality of human conflict; bodies shredded, cities razed, butchery en masse… nothing is too gruesome to be shielded from view despite the very real potential for traumatic response, and anyone, anywhere, with enough technical nous can sup at this table of blood fest until sated.
I tend to agree with Binoy and the other commentators on this matter; the Australian government is on a hiding to nothing in trying to shut down access to images of these incidents.
Surely it comes down to community standards and human dignity.
I try always to put myself in the situation, in this case having been stabbed in a public place and as I lie on the floor taking my last breath as blood pumps from a severed artery, somebody films me and posts it on the net.
Do I have any rights, do my family, my children,my grandchildren have any rights or do we accept Mr Musk’s interpretation of free speech and freedom of communication with my last moments on this troubled planet being viewed globally as if I were a player in a snuff video ?
To Musk it’s about ‘click-bait’ the more clicks he gets the more advertising revenue he gets.
I believe we must demand standards and the recognition of our dignity as human beings. I do not accept the world that Elon Musk wants us to live in.
Everyone’s seeking to understand the world and themselves. From the darkest recesses to the light, they do whatever they can to access the stories, imagery and accounts of others, real or imagined, so they can wrangle their emotions and motivations in an effort to comprehend their truth, and the truths of the world. So that they can compare, and navigate their path of existence and survival.
It is as normal as sitting and thinking, or just sitting, meditating, a discussion with a friend or acquaintance, and plumbing the depths of dreams and nightmares to have a sense of both the observed and the unknown. And normal that such processes can be switched off and on at will by all but those already obsessed and self-damaging.
It’s either that or commit to being cloistered (and corrupted) or resorting to mind numbing drugs and alcohol and the accompanying backlash. Or for that matter being beguiled by soporific affect of bling and excess.
Perhaps that is why the popularity and enduring veneration of the works of Shakespeare, and that folk cling to biblical stories and imagery, and those of the messengers of other gods.
It seems ludicrous that governments seek to selectively control such a normal human quest. They should drop the nice-guy, nice-gal parochialism and stick to filling potholes and making the trains run on time.
Clakka, the controversy is destined to continue unabated; but to put my cards on the table, I’m within the Edward de Vere camp at this point. There’s nothing in the historical record to suggest Shakespeare ever travelled outside of England. Not so with de Vere. Also nothing to suggest the (currently accredited) bard had anything but a passing and insubstantial relationship with the royalty & aristocracy of Britain and Scotland, again, in contrast to de Vere.
From whence did the astonishing intimacy of the portrayals of characters within Italy, Greece, Denmark et al arise?
It seems as the years pass by that there is more and more to suggest that Shakespeare was a convenient ruse for de Vere who faced severe sanction if not execution for the works that he immersed himself within.
But I digress. Apologies.
Unusually, I must vary from Terence Mills.
We all understand Musk well enough, but it is strawman stuff to remove focus from others who lie industrially behind virtuous faces to serve influences even worse than Musk.
Minns, Dreyfus and defacto censorship on issues like Gaza?
Terence Mills’ argument only works when other players are ethical too.
Look out Elon, Annabelle is very disappointed with you. You definitely don’t want her to become very very disappointed because that also includes a pasted on scowl.
@1.40pm.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2024/apr/25/australia-news-live-anzac-day-police-raids-sydney-anthony-albanese-bondi-stabbings-terror-threat
For Services Australia and ACOSS
Dear Amanda Rishworth and Cassandra Goldie,
I paid thousands of dollars as a result of the objection decision made by an anonymous ‘delegate or authorised officer”. I raised concerns with both of you regarding legality of the document but none of you answered. Both Services Australia and ACOSS advised me how to pay off the debt repayments or apply to AAT.
Amanda Rishworth and Cassandra Goldie, do you believe I was not eligible for a formal review by an authorised review officer? Please, respond.
Ah ha, Canguro,
Thanks for the digression. To me, it’s kinda like Stalin and Bulgakov, it’s completely understandable that he got the jitters, and cringed into certain shadows. Then for Mrs Bulgakov to go on and finish his masterpiece, it seems to matter little. It’s the works that count.