During the peak of global controversy in April over demands to remove tweets showing the stabbing of a Wakeley bishop, the Australian online safety regulator asked Elon Musk’s X to delete a tweet of the video posted by an Australian senator, Guardian Australia can reveal.
The office of the eSafety commissioner ordered X to remove tweets posting the video of the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel at his church in April, prompting a global furore over the role of online safety regulators and whether it amounted to censorship – including from Musk himself.
United Australia party senator Ralph Babet, the sole elected politician of the small conservative party, was among those who strongly criticised the eSafety commissioner for intervening to stop the spread of the video.
After X announced it would challenge the removal notices issued to it by the regulator and eSafety launched a federal court challenge against X, Babet reposted the stabbing video on his X account and his Facebook and Instagram pages embedded in a video of his own commentary about the attempted removal of the videos.
In April, Meta removed the posts when Guardian Australia asked the company whether different rules applied to senators for the video, which Meta had been automatically removing for every user. The post remains available on X, however, including for Australian users.
Babet’s office sent a freedom of information request to eSafety in late April for communications between eSafety and X regarding social media posts by Babet for 10 days in April after the Wakeley stabbing attack. The regulator provided removal request emails between eSafety and X on 23 April but did not identify the tweets or the user in the disclosure log file of the request.
The office of the eSafety commissioner initially declined to reveal the identity of the user or the tweets involved, but Guardian Australia filed a separate FoI request, which revealed Babet’s office’s request that identified the senator as the user in question.
Babet was elected to the Senate in 2022, the same year the UAP was deregistered.
The removal request came five hours after Babet posted the video, and the office of the eSafety commissioner indicated it was “class 1” classification content – which includes violence or violent extremism material, which the office deemed the stabbing video to be.
“eSafety handles all reports the same way, regardless of whom they relate to,” a spokesperson said.
“eSafety investigators assess reports for action against criteria specified in the Online Safety Act and, where relevant, may include context or circumstances in the assessment of harm.”
There is no evidence X complied with the requests. In other responses to removal requests, X said it was withholding the posts from being viewed by users based in Australia. Babet’s tweet was not featured in the list of tweets eSafety had sought to be removed which formed the abandoned federal court case brought by the regulator against X for failing to remove tweets with the video.
“No one, least of all a bureaucrat, should be attempting to censor a sitting Australian senator. The fact that the eSafety commissioner may have attempted to do this is an outrage,” Babet told Guardian Australia on Tuesday. “The office of the safety commissioner should be disbanded.”
The commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, abandoned a federal court case seeking penalties for X failing to enforce the removal request in June, telling Guardian Australia it was a more prudent use of taxpayer funds to respond to X’s administrative appeals tribunal case challenging the validity of the removal notices.
The AAT case has yet to be heard. Inman Grant told the ABC’s Q+A program last month that X has seven unresolved legal matters with her office. On Monday and Tuesday next week, the federal court will hear X’s challenge of the $610,500 fine issued last year by the commissioner for X’s alleged failure to answer questions on its moves to prevent child abuse material from being distributed on its platform.
X was approached for comment.
Separately, Babet faced criticism last month from fellow senators for what a Senate inquiry report said was a manipulated video of testimony provided to the committee inquiry into Australia’s excess mortality rate – deaths greater than might be expected – that he had posted to his social media pages.
“The committee notes that the edits in the video material were misleading as they gave the impression that witnesses were unable to answer questions. As such, the committee found that the video material did not meet the requirements of the Resolution on the Broadcasting of Committee Proceedings, the Senate or the committee. The committee also noted that Senator Babet had used excerpts of committee proceedings in paid posts on the social media platform, Facebook.”
The committee noted a letter written to Babet advising him a court may hold that the videos may not amount to a fair and accurate report of parliamentary proceedings, which would remove the protection from defamation action.
Agency heads of those who appeared in the videos also wrote to the committee advising that as a consequence of the posts, Babet’s followers had “posted threatening statements towards officials whose official evidence was misrepresented in the edited social media post”.
“For example, statements included reference to ‘hunting [witnesses] down’ and ensuring they are ‘shown the gallows’. This was distressing for witnesses and has the potential to cause harm.”
Babet’s posts were removed prior to the committee receiving the letter. Babet did not address the matter in his dissenting report and did not comment when asked by Guardian Australia.
