Elon Musk’s battle over the Sydney church stabbing video is not about freedom of speech. It’s to titillate his followers

‘Musk has decided to go to war with the eSafety commission … Australians have every right to be incensed by this.’ Photograph: Image Press Agency/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock

This battle was never about the removal of a single violent video for Elon Musk – it was always going to turn into a glib culture war fought with 4chan-style memes and late-night missives featuring Musk as the free speech antihero fighting Woke Governments of the World. At least, that is how he wishes to portray it to his more than 180 million followers.

Musk on Tuesday responded to an interim court order from Australia’s eSafety Commission requesting that X hide graphic and distressing videos of the recent Sydney stabbing within 24 hours with a Wizard of Oz meme: it’s all shits and giggles over at X. In further posts, he took aim at the eSafety commissioner, claiming she wants “authority over all countries on Earth”, after labelling her a “Commissar” for requesting the removal of the video in the first place, which depicted an attack that the NSW police have since classified as a terrorist incident.

Musk also found the time to mock the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, in between briefing his lawyers, to entertain and titillate his followers. If anyone wants to see a 16-year-old-boy allegedly attack bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel with a knife they should damn well have the right to. Governments of the world be damned.

Musk would like us to believe that this is about freedom of speech. Except it isn’t, at least not in any straightforward sense if we look at his record: Musk routinely bans and censors accounts he doesn’t agree with. In 2022, for example, he banned the accounts of several high-profile journalists from CNN, New York Times and The Washington Post who had been critical of him in the press, and suspended the accounts of several journalists earlier this year who had been critical of Israel’s war in Gaza. He has also banned journalists who are critical of his companies, sometimes with no explanation and fired an employee for being critical of his company on X. In 2022, he banned an account tracking the whereabouts of his own personal jet using publicly available data, along with other accounts belonging to journalists who had retweeted that data – and banned the personal account of the teenager who started it, Jack Sweeney.

The list could go on. Though he describes himself as a “free speech absolutist”, Musk’s approach to moderation and censorship has been anything but. These late-night tweet storms, banning sprees and ludicrous lawsuits are not designed to protect free speech, or even to uphold the US constitution (which does not and should not apply to Australians anyway). They are designed to silence his critics and entertain his followers.

One might argue that Musk has every right to make fun of our laws and our government on his own timeline and on his own dime. He bought the platform for billions of dollars, he can do what he wants over there. He also has the right to ban the accounts of people he doesn’t agree with and launch lawsuits if our government irritates him. Meme away. But the platform he took over is a global platform, and what happens on it consequently impacts 421 million users, 5.8 million of whom are Australian.

As we saw during the aftermath of the Bondi attack last week when a false name and identity of the attacker went viral on X and the wrong name even made it on to a Channel Seven report, posts on X can have real-world adverse consequences on our soil. Likewise, extremely violent content has the potential to exacerbate distress and cause riots or further violence – as we saw after the Wakeley attack when a riot broke out outside the Sydney church.

The video that Musk has been asked to remove depicts a violent terrorist act: it really is that simple. The Australian eSafety commissioner has asked that it be removed globally, and this is a fair and reasonable request. Rather than complying, as Meta has done, Musk has decided to go to war with the eSafety commission – ostensibly to defend his rather warped understanding of freedom of speech, but really to titillate his followers. Australians have every right to be incensed by this.

• Belinda Barnet is senior lecturer in media and communications at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne