Michael Knowles Unveils Worldwide Influence of Australia’s Speech Challenge Against Elon Musk

A court battle over censorship between Elon Musk and the Australian government will have massive ramifications for global free speech and journalism, Daily Wire host Michael Knowles said on Wednesday in an X thread.

In the thread, Knowles explained how Australia’s e-Safety Commissioner, which he first warned about in January 2023, has been battling Musk’s X for months over the removal of posts related to transgenderism. Recently, the e-Safety Commissioner has taken on X over posts that contain videos of the stabbing of a Christian bishop in Sydney earlier this month. Australia’s government has threatened to fine X over half a million dollars per day if it does not remove videos of the stabbing not only in Australia but for X users across the world.

Knowles said that the Australian government appears to be specifically targeting X for enforcement because of the platform’s allowance for independent research and journalism, as opposed to legacy media. The Daily Wire host argued that the moves from Australia’s e-Safety Commissioner, backed by top politicians, were part of an effort to “silence citizens and journalists worldwide.”

.@ElonMusk is in a battle against the Australian government to stop the World Economic Forum from silencing citizens and independent journalists worldwide. Here’s everything you need to know: 🧵

— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) April 24, 2024

Australia’s e-Safety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, is a dual American and Australian citizen who previously worked at Twitter. Grant is a proponent of the World Economic Forum’s so-called “Safety by Design” initiative, an initiative Knowles predicted in January 2023 would lead to censorship.

X responded to Grant’s order to remove the stabbing footage by disabling the content in Australia, but Musk refused to make the videos unavailable for X users across the world. The bishop who was the victim of the stabbing attack has sided with Musk and said he wants the videos to remain on X.

“While X respects the right of a country to enforce its laws within its jurisdiction, the eSafety Commissioner does not have the authority to dictate what content X’s users can see globally. We will robustly challenge this unlawful and dangerous approach in court,” X noted. “Global takedown orders go against the very principles of a free and open internet and threaten free speech everywhere.”

Top Australian officials have weighed in, with one senator calling for Musk to be jailed and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese saying that the government is “prepared to take whatever action is necessary to haul these companies into line.”

The actions to suppress the stabbing video come after the e-Safety commission targeted posts by critics of radical gender ideology, including Reduxx magazine and a Canadian activist known as “Billboard Chris.”

Billboard Chris was targeted after he posted something critical of Teddy Cook, a leftist activist who was recently appointed as an expert on a World Health Organization panel. The post, which was a comment on an article from The Daily Mail on Cook’s sexually themed social media history, was restricted in Australia, but Musk announced a lawsuit against the government over the censorship order.

Knowles pointed out that the censorship enforcement did not appear to be extended to others beyond X.

“Is eSafety fining Daily Mail $1M every 2 days for their Teddy Cook article? Or YouTube for hosting NBC’s church stabbing video? It doesn’t appear so. It appears that the WEF’s plot to impose eSafety on the world is targeted at you, at me, and at the place we can speak: X,” Knowles wrote on his X thread. “And so, the fate of global speech stands to be decided in a Kangaroo Court battle between a WEF-backed American lady who moved to Australia to censor the Internet and a South African man who moved to America who’s telling her she can’t.”