Independent Senator Jacqui Lambie has called for Australian politicians to abandon Elon Musk’s social media platform X and has said that Elon Musk should be jailed indefinitely.
Musk’s crime? Refusing to comply with the country’s chief censor’s demands for censorship, not only in Australia itself but around the world.
The recent injunction obtained by Commissioner Julie Inman Grant temporarily halted the distribution of posts containing footage from the terrorist attack.
The tech mogul has expressed much resistance to complying with the Australian eSafety Commissioner’s demands to remove content. This comes after Musk failed to remove footage and speech surrounding the recent attack, involving the stabbing of a Bishop in Sydney.
During an interview with Sky News Australia, Senator Lambie criticized Musk for allegedly fostering hatred by allowing the content to remain on his platform. She announced her boycott of X, urging her colleagues to follow suit, saying, “When you want to lead by example, it has to happen from here, so start switching off X.”
Lambie called Musk a “social media knob” with “no social conscience” and suggested that he should be jailed indefinitely. “Someone like that should be in jail and the key be thrown away,” Lambie said.
Senator Lambie’s remarks gained traction amid an ongoing backlash against Musk’s disregard for global censorship orders from the eSafety Commissioner. Both Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton expressed dissatisfaction with the billionaire’s free speech stance, with the Prime Minister calling for stronger government control over social media companies.
Prime Minister Albanese called Musk “arrogant” for refusing to carry out the government’s censorship demands, calling the censorship orders merely an enforcement of “common decency.”
Musk hit back at the criticism, saying that Australia shouldn’t be allowed to determine what speech is allowed for the whole world.
“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,” Musk said.
“We have already censored the content in question for Australia, pending legal appeal, and it is stored only on servers in the USA.
“Should the eSafety Commissar (an unelected official) in Australia have authority over all countries on Earth?”
