Australian judge says it is unreasonable to require X to hide video of church stabbing for all users

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — An Australian judge said it would be unreasonable for the country’s internet safety watchdog to require social platform X to hide video of a bishop being stabbed in a Sydney church from all of its users globally, as he explained his decision to lift a court order that had required X to hide the video of the attack.

Australian Federal Court Justice Geoffrey Kennett on Tuesday published his reasons for the decision a day earlier on the video that showed the stabbing of the Assyrian Orthodox bishop on April 15.

The company rebranded by billionaire Elon Musk when he bought Twitter last year was alone among social media platforms in disobeying Australia’s eSafety Commission’s removal notice on April 26 that required them take down the video of what Australian authorities have declared a terrorist act.

X geoblocked Australian X users, but eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, a former Twitter employee, wanted 65 URLs leading to the video also removed from the platform.

Kennett described X’s argument that removing the URLs was not a “reasonable” step as “powerful.”

He said the step clashed with an international concept of the “comity of nations,” which recognizes that countries’ laws have territorial limits.

“If given the reach contended for by the commissioner, the removal order would govern… the activities of a foreign corporation in the United States… and every country where its servers are located,” Kennett wrote.

“It would be a clear case of a national law purporting to apply to persons or matters over which, according to the comity of nations, the jurisdiction properly belongs to some other sovereign or state,” Kennett added.

Kennett said such an order would be “ignored or disparaged” by various