An Australian judge has ruled that the social media platform X is subject to a state’s anti-discrimination law even though it does not have an office in Australia.
Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal Judge Ann Fitzgerald said in a decision made public Friday that her court has jurisdiction over X Corp. in a hate speech complaint.
The ruling allows the Queensland Human Rights Commission to hear an allegation that X breached Queensland anti-discrimination law by failing to remove or hide anti-Muslim hate speech.
X had argued that the tribunal had no jurisdiction over the company because it had no presence in Queensland and the “impugned conduct” took place outside Queensland.
Musk wants to have his cake and eat it too. On the one hand, he says he’s a free speech absolutist. On the other hand, he says that free speech is “simply means that which matches the law.” So the law here says you don’t geoblock, you delete the video from your servers.
Which is it, Elon?
Oh right, Australia isn’t India.
If X wants to geoblock all of Australia they’re welcome to. I applaud any effort to speed along X’s irrelevance.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal Judge Ann Fitzgerald said in a decision made public Friday that her court has jurisdiction over X Corp. in a hate speech complaint.
The Australian Muslim Advocacy Network, which brought the case against Twitter in June 2022 before billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk bought and rebranded the platform last year, welcomed the decision as “precedent-setting.”
Fitzgerald’s decision “paved the way for social media companies to be held accountable for locally accessible content that may breach Australian hate speech laws,” the network said in a statement.
The complaint deals with material including video and photos that can be accessed through a link posted on X by an alleged far-right anti-Muslim conspiracy blog authored by an American citizen.
The tribunal has accepted the network’s request that the blog and its principal author not be identified for fear of “adverse consequences” for Muslims.
Musk is also fighting in Australian Federal Court a notice by an Internet safety watchdog to take down video of a 16-year-old boy allegedly stabbing an Assyrian Orthodox bishop in a Sydney church on April 15.
The original article contains 422 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 57%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Where my elon dickriders at? Try this experiment. Use any of these words on the internet…Elon, musk, tesla, monsanto, glyphosphate, roundup, gmo, nuclear energy, fracking. A magical thing happens where the thread gets birgaded by “experts in the field” explaining why you are wrong and all these things are chock full o’ vitamins. It almost feels like there is an office somewhere where people search keywords full time and throw up a firewall of bullshit to protect corporate interests.
I hate to defend Elon Musk, but Australia is in the wrong here. You don’t have the authority to censor a website, for the entire world, that isn’t even based in your country. Otherwise I’m sure Russia and China will be looking veeery interestedly at this…
china literally blocks Google because they can’t control it
I got the impression they just want to censor it for Australia or get blocked there. Much like China does for the vast majority of the internet.
This is a problem that’s been around about as long as the WWW itself and has not really been solved yet at all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LICRA_v._Yahoo!
Also further reading relevant here again: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/
