Elon Musk’s X has gotten its way over the Australian government after the Federal Court refused to extend a temporary order for the social media platform to hide videos of a widely-shared Sydney church stabbing.

Throughout April, a graphic video of a stabbing captured during a live-streamed sermon in Sydney was proliferated across social media platforms.

The incident itself saw Assyrian Christian bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel allegedly attacked and injured by a teenage knife-wielder, sparking a highly dangerous riot which saw a reported 51 police officers injured.

Shortly after, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, ordered both Elon Musk’s X and Facebook’s parent company Meta to take down posts containing the footage – and while Meta complied, X refused to play ball.

X – while only geographically restricting access to the posts so only those in Australia could not view them – accused Grant of overstepping her legal powers and threatened to take legal action in response to her takedown orders.

However, the safety commissioner got ahead of X by making a successful Federal Court application for a temporary injunction to force the platform to block some 65 posts which included a clip of the incident.

And while X has largely disobeyed this court order since 22 April, Federal Court Justice Geoffrey Kennett has denied the eSafety Commissioner’s application to extend the injunction – marking a win for X in the hot-button court case.

A full statement on Kennett’s reasoning for the decision will be heard in coming weeks.

“The Federal Court today did not grant the eSafety Commissioner’s application to extend the interim injunction requiring X Corp to hide the material identified in the removal notice given to X Corp on 16 April 2024,” said the eSafety Commissioner.

“The removal notice required X Corp to take all reasonable steps to ensure removal of the extreme violent material of the alleged terrorist act at Wakeley in Sydney on 15 April 2024.”

The matter will return to court for a case management hearing on 15 May, while a full trial regarding the commissioner’s demands will be held at a later date.

Ideological clashes in court

As reported by the ABC, X’s lawyer Bret Walker told the court on Friday the company had not complied with the temporary injunction because the commissioner’s initial take-down notice was not valid.

Walker argued it was a “really remarkable position” for a country to argue its only way to control what’s available to users in Australia is “to deny it to everybody on Earth”.

Meanwhile, eSafety’s lawyer Tim Begbie, told the court the issue wasn’t “a free speech policy debate”, but was expressly about Australia’s “Online Safety Act”.

Begbie further cited research that a quarter of Australian end users make use of a virtual private network (VPN) – enabling them to view content otherwise restricted by location.

Begbie also noted that if X’s defiance led to a lapse of the court’s orders, then "what that says about the authority of the court is pretty striking".

On X, Musk has openly disputed eSafety’s action and questioned whether the commissioner should “have authority over all countries on Earth”.

“Our concern is that if ANY country is allowed to censor content for ALL countries, which is what the Australian ‘eSafety Commissar’ is demanding, then what is to stop any country from controlling the entire Internet?”, wrote Musk.

“We have already censored the content in question for Australia, pending legal appeal, and it is stored only on servers in the USA.”

On Saturday, Musk further criticised Meta for having complied and removed the content, telling his followers “only X resisted censoring your voice”.

Meanwhile, X’s non-compliance has led Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to label Musk an “arrogant billionaire” and declare the government would “do what’s necessary” to take him on.

“The idea that someone would go to court for the right to put up violent content on a platform shows how out-of-touch Mr Musk is,” Albanese said.

“Social media needs to have social responsibility with it. Mr Musk is not showing any.”

While the recent court proceedings mark the most controversial interaction between X and the eSafety commissioner to date, they’re far from the first.

In June 2023, Grant – who previously worked as Twitter’s Director of Public Policy for Australia and SE Asia – issued a legal notice seeking answers on what the platform was doing to tackle online hate.

In September 2023, the eSafety commissioner went on to issue a fine of more than $600,000 for failing to answer questions about the prevention of child abuse material on its platform, and in April, the commissioner and X came to heads over an order to remove a post which vilified a transgender activist.