Musk puts seat belts in cybertrucks. Now he must put them in cyberspace

Second, X has removed footage of other violent terrorist acts at the request of other regulators. For example, X has taken down hundreds of posts of Hamas terrorist acts at the request of the European Union’s regulator.

Again, how can Musk reconcile different treatment of similar material if it’s truly a principled stand on free speech? Doesn’t add up.

Third is the stated policy of X’s chief executive, Linda Yaccarino: “There is no place on X for terrorist organisations or violent extremist groups, and we continue to remove such accounts in real time, including proactive efforts,” she wrote in a letter to EU regulators in October.

“We strictly adhere to our policies concerning illegal content, and we continue to remove illegal content including terrorist content from our platform”. That’s the X policy, set out by the X CEO. Yet Musk flouts it. Doesn’t add up.

Musk has tried to make it look like it adds up, nonetheless. He says X has geo-blocked access to the footage from users in Australia; he’s only rejecting the idea of Australia as “global censor”.

The eSafety commission is unimpressed; it’s inadequate because there are ways to skirt geo-blocking. One in four Australians use a Virtual Private Network or VPN, for instance. And X previously has blocked access to such material worldwide, and continues to do so in many other cases.

Musk has added another kink to his claims – that the Australian eSafety commission sought removal of “comments” on the attack, and is therefore assaulting free speech. Not so. The Australian regulator is concerned only with the video footage.

As the eSafety office says: “The removal notice does not relate to commentary, public debate or other posts about this event. It only concerns the video of the violent stabbing attack on Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel.”

The unavoidable conclusion is that Musk has gone rogue, not only picking a fight with Australia but defying his own company’s policies and practices to do so.

A ready reckoner of Musk’s delinquency? Note that we are not talking about any other of the so-called “social media” firms, only Musk’s. All the others, every one, acted on the eSafety office’s order. What he’s doing is rogue even in an industry of rogues.

But why has he gone rogue now, and why Australia? There are a few factors at play.

One, he’s cranky with Australia because he seems to think the eSafety commissioner has a grudge against him. Inman Grant – who once worked for X when it was still Twitter, incidentally, in a classic case of the poacher-turned-gamekeeper – is pursuing X over several matters.

Among other things, she issued an infringement notice to X last year over its policy on child sexual abuse materials and levied a fine of $610,500. X refused to pay; it’s spent more money on lawyers quibbling over it than the sum of the fine itself.

Besides, Australia is a handy sized punching bag. It lacks the sheer market power of the EU and the regulatory relevance of the US, but it’s big enough to get some attention.

Note that Musk doesn’t criticise the Chinese government, an actual communist state and the world’s most successful censor of the internet. He puts a higher value on selling Tesla EVs to China than on defending his high principle.

Two, he seems to enjoy picking fights through litigation. For example, he sued a US non-profit group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, for a report that it published alleging that X was profiting from hate speech.

How? Because Musk had reinstated scores of user accounts of “neo-Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists and spreaders of dangerous conspiracy theories”.

The judge in a US federal court last month dismissed the case brought by X, concluding: “This case is about punishing the defendants for their speech.” So much, once more, for Musk’s principled attachment to free speech.

Three, X’s business isn’t going so well. He bought the company, then Twitter, for $US44 billion a year and a half ago. Today its market value is $US41 billion. He’s lost advertisers and lost relevance for the company.

Even though the value of other big US tech companies has surged. Facebook’s owner, Meta, for example, currently is valued at $US440 billion, more than 10 times’ X’s worth. Ouch.

An American billionaire investor in the company and critic of Musk’s strategy, Ross Gerber, says that “the reality is, Twitter is dying, and it needs to be saved”.

With the business doing badly, his pretence of high principle must be about all Musk can hold on to to justify the acquisition. Even if he’s confected his fight with Australia.

And next? The eSafety commissioner and X are scheduled to go to court again on May 10 over the take-down order. Depending on the outcome, Inman Grant has further punitive powers at her disposal, should she choose to use them.

Under Australia’s Online Safety Act, she can order a link removed. And, in extremis, she can delete an app – that is, direct the app stores like Google to scrub the X app from their offerings.

As for the PM, Albanese seemed to relish giving his psychological diagnosis of Musk. It worked for him politically, to pose as the defender of Aussie family values and simple decency against an erratic foreign miscreant and bully.

But he’ll let the matter ride for a while now, lest he give the electorate the impression that he’s not paying due attention to the people’s priorities. As for Peter Dutton’s idea of imposing an age limit of 16 for people to use “social media” to limit its output of social misery, the government considers it unenforceable and won’t pursue it.

The social misery firms already pretend to demand a minimum age of 13 of their users, which, of course, is easily skirted and widely ignored.

Inman Grant, in recent times, has described the state of the industry as being in its “seatbelt moment”. Analogous to the moment when global regulators demanded that a runaway car industry install seatbelts.

But in the case of car safety, the US was at the forefront. In the case of big tech, the US actually granted the sector lawlessness by legislating a specific loophole, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It absolves the industry from the responsibilities that all other publishers must observe. At the time, they were small tech. Now big tech, they are despoiling civilisation and making a fortune from it.

Unless the US Congress finds the backbone to require seatbelts and product recalls at source – in America – regulating it will remain a messy hit-and-miss affair for governments everywhere. Maximum fuss, maximum drama, maximum Musk.

Peter Hartcher is political editor.