Good day, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Today, a panel with two of the most illustrious and thoughtful Australian commentators. Claire Lehman is the editor of Quillette, the online magazine of big ideas. And Peter Van Onsson is the political editor of Daily Mail Australia and a political professor at the University of Western Australia. Good day, Claire. Good to be here. Twitter's at war with the Australian government. Can we call it Twitter? Is that all right? Do I have to call it X? What do you do, Claire? Is anyone ever going to call it X? I call it Twitter. Yeah, I call it Twitter. All right. So Australia's e-safety commissioner, which is actually a real role if you're not in

Australia.

There is an e-safety commissioner, which Elon likes to call like an Australian censorship commissar.

That's what he calls it, a commissar of censorship.

They took Twitter to court to try to force the company to take down about 60 instances of footage

of the stabbing of a bishop in a church attack. That happened two days after the Bondi

stabbing. And at the time, Twitter agreed to geo-block the posts so that Australian users

couldn't see them. But it refused the ruling from the E-Safety

Commissioner to remove them altogether from Twitter.

That would have had a global effect, and Elon Musk said that the Australian

censorship commissar was demanding global content bans, and X released an official statement

saying the order was not within the scope of Australian

law. Now, what's happened this week is that the federal court has basically given Elon an early

win. It has rejected the Australian government's request to extend the temporary order for Twitter

to hide videos of the terrorist stabbing globally until a proper court date resolves the issue once

and for all in a few weeks time. Claire, this is like one of those issues that keeps coming up

all over the world, like are social media platforms right to resist government censorship

of things that they put on their platform, whether users do, or are government's right to rein in

extreme content? Yeah, well, extreme content's a broad term, but I think in this situation,

I'm definitely with Elon, because, you know, it was a real event, it happened, the footage was not

confected by some AI- AI generated tool, and the Australian

government has no right to tell social media users around the world what they can and can't watch,

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