(Bloomberg) — Australia is bracing for a showdown with Elon Musk and U.S. social media giants over allegations they didn’t respond quickly enough to police graphic content and misinformation during two violent attacks in Sydney over the past 10 days.
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In the past 24 hours, five government ministers have flagged a possible move to introduce tougher laws, including a mandatory code of conduct for social media companies operating in Australia. Musk owns X, formerly Twitter, and fought back.
Calls for a crackdown on social media companies have grown following two stabbing attacks in Sydney, including a terrorist attack at an Assyrian Orthodox church on April 15 and a mass stabbing attack at a shopping mall, which killed six people on April 13.
As both incidents unfolded, explicit content of the stabbing attacks was widely published on social media platforms, while misinformation quickly spread about the identity, motivations and origin ethnicity of the attackers.
Australia has an e-safety commissioner with the power to order the removal of content from social media. However, in a public statement, an X spokesperson said the commissioner “does not have the power to dictate what content X users can see around the world.” The company said it would “vigorously challenge” the orders in court.
In a message to X on Friday evening, Musk referred to the commissioner as “Australia’s censorship commissioner.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said it was “extraordinary” that X had resisted government demands over the Sydney attacks.
“The overwhelming majority of Australians want misinformation and disinformation to stop. It’s not about free speech, but the dangerous implications that can arise when things that simply aren’t true spread, he said at a news conference Monday.
This is not the first time that Elon Musk has clashed with national authorities. Earlier this month, lawyers representing X told Brazil’s Supreme Court that the company would comply with all of its orders, a week after the billionaire said he would defy his judges and lift restrictions on some accounts.
Read more: Musk’s X Retreats, pledging to comply with Brazilian court orders
Australia’s Emergency Services Minister Murray Watt said the public was “fed up with these narcissistic billionaires who think they are above the law.”
Meta Platforms Inc., led by Mark Zuckerberg, operates a much larger online ecosystem, spanning WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter-like threads, but it has not taken the same combative stance as X.
“They have a social responsibility to do the right thing towards their consumers. They don’t. They believe they are above the law. They don’t care about the laws we have in place. And I think it’s absolutely right that we pursue them,” Watt said in an interview with Sky News on Sunday.
In addition to tougher measures targeting inappropriate content, Australia is considering introducing new legislation to crack down on misinformation, particularly around national elections. Following the two attacks in April, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said he would consider supporting new laws introduced by the government.
(Updated with comments from the Australian Prime Minister.)
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