Joe Hildebrand: Publishing knife attack on bishop on Musk’s X platform is madness

Is it okay for X to allow the brutal stabbing of a bishop in a church to be infinitely reposted because it was accidentally captured by the church’s own recording. Not if it ends up being a glorified call to jihad, writes Joe Hildebrand.

Free speech is the most fundamental cornerstone of a democracy. Indeed, without it there can be no democracy. The first thing to die in any dictatorship is the right of someone to say: “This is wrong.”

Censorship also inevitably fails and often causes more damage than it prevents.

By way of just one globally catastrophic example, numerous attempts to censor – or, as we might say now, “deplatform” – the Nazi Party were made during the chaotic Weimar Republic. And we know how that worked out.

This is because the suppression of ideas turns madmen into martyrs and oppressors into victims. An idiotic or evil ideology that is not revealed for its idiocy or evil has a far greater allure than one that has its pants down in the town square.

Censorship, by its very nature, gives such expressions of stupidity a kind of credibility and power they do not deserve.

Again, Nazism, for all the murderous horror that it produced, is, at its heart, an ideology rooted in sheer insanity and total untruths.

It is nothing more than batshit bunkum, and if it had been fully known and fully exposed for what it was then, perhaps the 20th century would have been less deadly for tens of millions of souls.

That, then, is the argument for free speech – a principle I have championed for years and been most thoroughly abused for as a result.

But there is always a “but”. Free speech is vital, but it is not limitless. As the old maxim goes, it does not extend to shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre.

In other words, it does not extend to inciting violence or chaos or harm. A mobster saying “Hey, Gino, kill Tommy!” is not exercising his right to free speech – he is committing murder.

Elon Musk picks the wrong hill to die on in defending the spread of an attack on a bishop on his social media platform, X, writes Joe Hildebrand. Picture: Etienne Laurent / AFP

Sadly, it seems that this subtle distinction has been lost in the debate around whether social media companies should be allowed to peddle terrorist acts in the name of freedom of political expression.

Australia, unlike the US, has no enshrined right to free speech, but our High Court happily found some years ago that the right to freedom of political expression was implied in the Constitution. However, just this week, the Federal Court decided this right to freedom of political expression did not extend to X’s right to recirculate video of the alleged Wakeley terror attack ad nauseum.

Elon Musk – an unquestionable genius and otherwise commendable freedom fighter – had picked this hill to die on. In the eyes of Australian law, his body rests there still, although no doubt it remains animated elsewhere.

Point being, it was the wrong hill. Fighting for the right of terrorists and their sympathisers to broadcast bloody attacks as propaganda and recruitment tools has as much to do with free speech as a video of an Auschwitz gassing sent to Nazi HQ.

The take-down request issued by Australia’s eSafety commissioner was hardly a deep state conspiracy. This was footage of an alleged attack – perhaps an alleged attempted murder – and certainly the subject of a criminal court case, in which all such allegedness will be tested.

Moreover, it seems that other violent footage will be at the heart of this and related cases. It is alleged that numerous beheading videos were in the possession of those charged.

But let us leave all the particulars of that case aside for a moment.

Is an ISIS combatant decapitating a hostage merely exercising his freedom of speech?

Or is the Christchurch gunman who slaughtered dozens in a mosque merely exercising his free speech when he livestreams it on Facebook?

Or is it okay for X to allow the brutal stabbing of a bishop in a church to be infinitely reposted because it was accidentally captured by the church’s own innocent recording and ended up being a glorified call to jihad?

This is not a free and fearless contest of ideas, this is madness. This is the virulent dissemination of violence which we know is being used to inspire murder.

Indeed, the frenzied circulation of actual terror attacks doesn’t even meet the threshold of hate speech, let alone the threshold of free speech.

For all those who feast upon it, it is something more like death porn.

And social media is happily spreading it. These supposedly progressive gatekeepers of Silicon Valley have unleashed a tsunami of horror on society, from terrorism to take-your-own-life.

There must be a reckoning. Free speech does not mean free slaughter.

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Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: Publishing knife attack on bishop on Musk’s X platform is madness