Elon Musk’s X fought against an order to remove harrowing Bondi massacre content, telling eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant the footage showing murder victims was “no worse than a gore movie”.
Australia’s internet regulator detailed the struggle to purge graphic terror attack footage amid ongoing friction with tech giants at the Royal Commission into anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion on Thursday.
Following the December 14 attack on a Hanukkah celebration, highly graphic and confronting material circulated online, including footage of the shooting, images of victims, and explicit witness accounts.
In response to the spread of this violent content, the eSafety Commission set up a dedicated investigation team to address it.
Ms Inman Grant said takedowns can be delayed as Australian law requires a Classification Board ruling before the regulator can force tech platforms to remove content.
“We fought hard against X in terms of not allowing that post-mortem Bondi content,” she said.
“We fought really hard and we were able to get them to agree to keep that ‘Refused Classification’.”
Ms Inman Grant said that while in the past platforms had worked through protocols to remove content, compliance from major tech companies has deteriorated.
She said platforms were increasingly weaponising the legal process to protect their ability to distribute and monetise violent material.
“I would say that the willingness of the mainstream tech platforms to work cooperatively with us, even in a mass casualty situation, has changed somewhat,” Ms Inman Grant said.
“These are mainstream platforms that are fighting for the right and ability to distribute and monetise this content.
“We’re at a place where the companies won’t just take our word for it when we say . . . ‘we think this is Class One content’.
“They say ‘we need the Classification Board review before we’ll consider taking it down’.
“Typically, it takes the classification board 30 days to classify material.
“If you pay for an expedited review, that takes five days.
“That’s an absolute lifetime when we’re talking about a mass casualty event and we’re trying to stem the virality of that.”
Ms Inman Grant said that it was increasingly difficult for online monitors in Australia who were having to view more extreme content, like videos of “Charlie Kirk’s assassination” or “the beheading of Scandinavian backpackers” and that they were exploring if AI could assist further in identifying extreme content.
She also revealed that eSafety had recently worked with the Classification Board to officially ban 13 terrorist manifestos containing hate speech, leading to a year-long effort that removed 133 related pieces of content from extreme websites.
Several Australian law enforcement officials also testified at the Royal Commission on Thursday and said tech companies offer “varied” responses when asked to remove extremist material.
Most said police were forced to rely on the eSafety Commissioner to lobby major platforms.
High-profile takedowns include a weapon-related webpage and a video of a bishop being stabbed, which was used online as terrorism propaganda.
The testimonies from the Australian Federal Police and state forces came after online experts on Wednesday argued that tech platforms are not doing enough to curb harmful content.
WA Police Deputy Commissioner Kylie Whiteley told the Royal Commission growing online hate and anti-Semitism had been the “catalyst” for the force to establish a “hate crime team”.
“I would say it’s been very consistently increasing,” she said, highlighting the October 7, 2023 attacks as a turning point.
“I think there’s been some element of it for some period of time but certainly we’ve taken some proactive measures in relation to our hate crimes team from April 2025 because we started to see matters that we needed to respond to.”
It comes as WA has had two high-profile extremism cases in the past year, both of which were raised by nation’s spy chief Mike Burgess at his annual threat assessment last week.
At an “Invasion Day” rally in Perth on Australia day a man allegedly threw a homemade improvised “fragmented bomb” into a crowd of hundreds of protesters, including elders, women, and children.
Police have charged Liam Alexander Hall, 32, with engaging in a terrorist attack which marked the first time an individual has ever been prosecuted for the specific offence in WA’s history.
Counter-terrorism police also foiled an alleged white supremacist mass-casualty terror plot by a 20-year-old Bindoon man after a raid in February.
Officers allegedly discovered a haul of weapons and a manifesto detailing plans to attack WA’s Parliament House, police headquarters and mosques.
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