The online watchdog has dropped its legal action against Elon Musk’s social media giant X after it refused to remove content related to the Sydney church stabbing.
eSafety launched proceedings in the Federal Court earlier this year after X, formerly Twitter, vowed to fight a global take-down order content from the attack.
X Corp initially agreed to “geoblock” the content, which restricted local access, but claimed the Australian government lacked authority to force a global ban.
Despite setting a date for the court hearing, eSafety commissioner Julia Inman Grant announced on Wednesday that those proceedings would be halted.
In a statement, eSafety said it had decided to “consolidate action” concerning what it called class 1 content in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
“We now welcome the opportunity for a thorough and independent merits review of my decision to issue a removal notice to X Corp by the tribunal,” Ms Grant said.
“Our sole goal and focus in issuing our removal notice was to prevent this extremely violent footage from going viral, potentially inciting further violence and inflicting more harm on the Australian community.”
Ms Grant said the online watchdog “considered this option (abandoning legal action) likely to achieve the most positive outcome for the online safety of all Australians, especially children”.
eSafety took X Corp to court in an attempt to force the platform to take down about 60 instances of footage from the alleged attack on Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel at the Wakely church on April 15.
A temporary order barring the content from being displayed was later thrown out by the Federal Court, with parallel proceedings launched by X Corp in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
Standing by eSafety’s take-down order, Ms Grant said the key issue “was the ease with which children” could access violent content and she expected “reasonable companies” to take action.
“By its own admission, X Corp routinely does … X Corp said it took action on 226,000 items of content following reports of illegality and ‘globally deleted 40,000 items of content’,” Ms Grant said.
“Other major social media platforms and search engines complied with our (take-down) requests and removal notices, including Meta, Microsoft, Google, Snap, TikTok, Reddit and Telegram.
“So, it was a reasonable expectation when we made our request to remove extremely graphic video of an attack that X Corp would take action in line with these publicly stated policies and practices.”
X Corp had earlier vowed to fight the global take-down order, with the site’s billionaire owner, Mr Musk, blasting the “Australian censorship commissioner” who was “demanding global bans”.