The Highwire with Del Bigtree - ELON MUSK DEFIANT AS AUSTRALIA DEMANDS GLOBAL CONTENT TAKEDOWN

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has issued a global takedown order to Elon Musk and X, of controversial video content. The content shows Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel being attacked with a knife during a live stream of a church service by a suspected terrorist. The move has sparked outrage among X users, and defiance from Musk. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Just about two weeks ago, there was a bishop in Sydney, Australia that was stabbed during a live sermon at his church, along with several other churchgoers. And we have part of the video here, obviously, we're not going to show the whole thing. And this has now become a focal point for the global conversation in government-sponsored censorship. And shortly after that happened, because it created quite an uproar, there was protests, and that police. police describe this as a terrorist attack. So we labeled it a terrorist attack. This was the headline here shortly after that. Sydney Church stabbing was terrorist attack. Police say it's BBC news. So that puts it in a whole new category as opposed to just other, some other random act of violence. But you go in here into this article and it says the government, that's Australian

government, has told meta the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, as well as X, formerly known as Twitter, to remove offensive content relating to the attack from their platforms within 24 hours of face potential fines. Now, it wasn't the Australian government. It was the e-safety commissioner in Australia, and she's in charge of this whole thing. This whole apparatus was put into effect in 2015 from something called the Online Safety for Children Act. So it was originally started to prevent child bullying online.

So keep that in mind as we go through this story because we can see how far this thing has ran and how much government is trying to take the power. And now the woman that runs that has just been re-elected from another five years, so that would be 12 years 12 years as her tenure there, just as a side note. So what happened from there is X, Meta, all of these organizations,

they removed it in Australia. They put geolocators on it and removed it in Australia. But then we get this headline here. Australian court orders Elon Musk's X to hide Sydney church stabbing posts from users globally. Now this changes the whole conversation. So it says here, because this now has went to court, it says in a hearing late on Monday afternoon,

barrister for e-safety, Christopher Tran, told Justice Jeffrey Kennett that X had geo-blocked the posts containing the video, meaning Australians could not access them. However, the posts were still accessible globally to the Australians who used a virtual private network VPN connection that made their IP addresses appear outside Australia. So because of that, the e-safety commissioner is saying, I want you to block this globally on the platform. So you have one country reaching into a social media platform and directing their global communications and global censorship, really. So right now, as it stands, there's a May 10th court case, federal court case in Australia to really decide the fate of this. So we'll know something next week. But if this, if X and Elon Musk have found

to be error on this, then they're talking about over $700,000 a day fine for the days the video was up. I think he can afford it. I think that's the problem, right. Exactly. Exactly. So one of the interesting things about this story is it was a tragic event. No one died. In fact, the bishop actually went back to giving sermons.

And this is one of the headlines here. Sidney Bishop speaks of losing sight in one eye after alleged church stabbing. This is Bishop Mar Mara Marie-Emanuel. And he told his congregation, his eye injury was a sacrifice, and he forgives the alleged offender. But he also said this in this article. He says, I say to our beloved. the Australian government and our beloved Prime Minister, the Honorable Mr. Albanyes, every human being has the right to their freedom of speech and freedom of religion,

every human being for us to say that free speech is dangerous, that free speech cannot be possible in a democratic country. I'm yet to fathom this. So you have the very person at the center of this standing up for free speech, which is quite a stance for someone like that. And so the bigger picture of this whole conversation, though, this isn't happening in a vacuum, the censorship speech. This is going on all over the place. Last summer, the communications minister in Australia put forth a bill, a draft legislation to give sweeping powers to Australia's media regulatory authority.

And it fell flat because at the time, if you remember, there wasn't much, there weren't a lot of bills out there. They were kind of a frontrunner. That's not the case anymore. But at the time, we look at this article, this was eight months ago when they tried this. Just check this out. Labor misinformation law, a dangerous proposition for society. This is some really great reporting here. And it says the proposal in the bill to clamp down on people whose commentary may disrupt

public order or cause economic harm could have a chilling effect on the right to protest, stifling debate and freedoms of assembly. According to New South Wales Council for Civilities President Josh Pallas, Pallas said the proposal to exempt government information from being categorized as misinformation carried the implication that governments were by definition truthful at all times. So we've got to look at that and say, gee, I wonder why that failed. But think about that. Governments can never be categorized as misinformation.

I mean, the last four years alone during the COVID response should sweep any type of conversation about that amendment out of a bill like that. But now what's happening in Australia is there's been a renewed stance for this bill. So this was the headline eight months ago, labor to overhaul misinformation bill after objections over freedom of speech. So they went back to, you know, went back to the drawing board. But now they've come back out in the wake of this stabbing, this Sydney church stabbing. And these are what the headlines look like now.

Peter Dutton backs law to crack down on above the law, social media companies over misinformation. Now, he's the opposition leader. That's of the largest political party in the House of Representatives in Australia. So this is a very big, very big deal in Australia happening right now. It seems like this conversation is turning pretty fast on the back of this. So this May 10th court ruling, if it happens at that point, we'll be really interesting to see what happens. But this isn't just in Australia, obviously, this is all over the developed world at this point.

In Germany, we have Mario Voigt. He's one of the leaders of a major political party in Germany. This was the headline just recently that came out of Germany. Thuringian CDU boss calls for social media licenses for every user. And those would be revocable by the government if basically they don't like what you're saying. So think about that. He had to come back out and apologize and said, well, it's a little misunderstanding what I said there. But that should just give you an idea of where governments are looking at this point.

You're seeing this echo chamber of censorship coming from the mouths of various government officials in many countries throughout the world. One of them is Scotland. We've been reporting on Scotland's hate crime law, hate speech bill, where it basically criminalizes certain type of speech and activity, but also life imprisonment, guilty until proven innocent, police have the right to enter your home. Well, the person who signed this bill and who campaigned for it,

Hulmsa Yusuf, the first minister of Scotland, was facing at the beginning this week a vote of confidence. And what that is, is a majority of legislators, when they disapprove of the government's actions, they can put up a vote and vote no confidence and remove that person in their entire cabinet. So he was facing that with no hope of passing this. A lot of legislators are not happy with him right now. So what did he do? Here's the headline. He has stepped down. Scotland's leader resigns after conflicts over climate change, gender identity, weakened government. And it says directly in this article, why was that? Support for the Scottish

National Party in part declined after the party backed legislation to make it easier for people to change their gender and implemented a hate crime law that made transgender identity a protected characteristic, even though the same protections weren't given to all women. Yeah, we've been reporting on that for many weeks now. And again, I love these stories because it still shows the power of the people, even in democracies or republics that are not as strong as they are here in the United States of America, it does matter. When people step up, when they protest, when they peacefully protest and go out and say, we are not going to stand for this, it really makes a difference. And frankly, here in America, we need to start getting out in the

streets and standing for what we care about, too. And you see this slippery slope. You see this in Australia. It starts with a little law. Well, we just want to make sure that it's safe for our kids. We've talked about some of those things here, TikTok, things like that. But it is every decision we make, the government never just stops there, right? It, always begins a ball, little snowball, and what snowball do you want to start today? Which one has a little pet issue that you'd like the government to fix for you? Let's get that rolling. It ends up bulldozing all of us.

So we've really got to get smarter about using the government to fix the issues that maybe we need to do on a local level, on a school board level. You know, more and more, I just see the power of smaller government, keeping it close to you, instead of just letting big government move in to fix your tiny problems. And this next story exemplifies that because we're talking misinformation and big government trying to solve a problem we're being told is the biggest problem in the world. And what we're going to do is something we've done to show. I heard they've just released a video that exemplifies the political journey

of the Hums of Youseps. Let's take a look at this. Nice knowing you. Good luck with everything else. Stay off the scooters.