CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Billionaire Elon Musk’s showdown with the Albanese government has escalated overnight, as the Blood Diamond Nepo Baby defies a federal court order to remove extremist content from his platform X – which everyone still calls Twitter.
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, backed by a rare united front of Australian politicians, wants the “extreme violent video content” deleted from servers as Meta and TikTok have done.
However, Elon Musk appears ready for a fight, and won’t be told what to by a handful of measly administrators from a colonial backwater in the Pacific.
But it appears that the eccentric tycoon has a not familiarised himself with Australia’s blanket-ban culture that could very well result in his platform booted from Australia permanently if he causes any more trouble – as was the case with firearms, nightclubs and e-scooters.
Musk – a self-described ‘free speech absolutionist’ – is adamant that the footage will not be taken down.
With the nation’s traditional news companies currently gridlocked in negotiations with social media publishers over the discontinuation of the Media Bargaining Code – it seems now, in the wake of several horrific domestic tragedies being broadcasted to the world online, that both Federal and State Governments will strike while the iron is hot and make moves to finally regulate social media content.
Musk, and his thousands of highly vocal online followers, believe that restricting any form of content from the internet is an attack on free speech.
Although in 2024 any efforts to stop children from watching massacres – being live-streaming into their phones while sitting in classroom – is generally considered and attack on free speech.
Musk believes Australia has a history of curbing free speech, which all started when Liberal Senator Don Chipp removed all classifications from literature in an exchange for a solid rating system of film and TV.
The Blood Diamond Nepo Baby’s unmarried online followers believe that once the Australian government applied an R-rating to the 1972 Australian film ‘Alvin Purple’ – the long slide towards no free speech began, eventually leaving us where are today, in a country where our government feels it has to right to ban Australians from using social media platforms to falsely accuse public figures of being pedophiles from burner accounts that look like credible news outlets.
