X’s ‘licence’ to operate in Australia questioned

Senior counsel assisting the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has openly questioned whether X should be permitted to keep operating in Australia.

Richard Lancaster SC has delivered a withering assessment of Elon Musk’s platform as the Commission’s third block of hearings closed in Sydney.

He told the Commission that X Corp’s conduct, both before the inquiry and in its dealings with government and regulators, “begs the question whether X Corp has or ought to have a social licence to operate in Australia”.

Lancaster singled X out for particular criticism, telling Commissioner Virginia Bell SC that the Commission had written to the platform on more than one occasion but received only an acknowledgement that its letter had been received.

He said evidence from Tal-Or Cohen of CyberWell, which monitors online antisemitism globally, was that X, along with YouTube, continued to present the most significant challenges among the platforms her organisation tracked, particularly around coded antisemitism, AI-generated content and emerging narratives.

X’s removal rate for antisemitic content had fallen from 54 per cent in 2024 to just over 29 per cent in 2026, the lowest of any platform.

Hannah Rose of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue gave evidence that her organisation had surfaced 128 posts on X glorifying terrorist violence that had drawn more than 16 million views.

Following the 2 October 2025 terrorist attack at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester, she said, there was a 28 per cent increase in antisemitic slurs on X.

Dr Matteo Vergani of the Tackling Hate Lab drew on more than two million posts in analysing hate directed at both the Jewish and Muslim communities in Australia, documenting a significant spike against both after 7 October.

Lived-experience witnesses Arsen Ostrovsky, Stephen Lowy and federal MP Josh Burns each gave detailed evidence of antisemitic material published against them on X.

In Ostrovsky’s case, the material followed the Bondi Hanukkah attack. In Lowy’s case, it included threats to his safety and that of his family.

In Burns’s case, it included material supporting attacks on his electorate office.

X Corp had not responded to any of it, Lancaster said, noting that a platform styling itself a champion of unconstrained speech “has remained silent.”

Lancaster reserved his sharpest criticism for X’s response to footage from the Bondi attack itself.

A video showing deceased people at the scene immediately after the attack was refused classification and cannot be published.

X Corp challenged that refusal, and the eSafety Commissioner successfully defended the decision at first instance.

In its submissions seeking to reduce the classification rating, Lancaster said, X attached “page after page of images from the Holocaust” to argue that notorious depictions of historic and political significance remained available online.

He described the move as extraordinary, saying the images gave no support to X’s case and that the use of Holocaust imagery in that context “should be unequivocally condemned”.

The eSafety Commissioner gave evidence that X was among the most adversarial of her relationships with mainstream entities.

There had been eight cases between eSafety and X Corp in the Federal Court or the Administrative Review Tribunal over the scope of eSafety’s powers, six of them started by X.

The company had also opposed a digital duty of care in a letter to government “to which no officer of the company was prepared to put his or her name”.

Lancaster contrasted X with platforms that had cooperated to varying degrees.

Telegram, which has no presence in Australia, did not respond to correspondence.

Reddit provided a partial response. OpenAI, Twitch and the Australian platform Kick each provided what he described as a reasonable degree of cooperation.

He said Google, through its witness Ms Lord, had refused to provide information about overseas decisions to cut content-moderation staff, and had declined to remove YouTube content labelling Ostrovsky a “false flag actor” despite its own community guidelines.

The Australian app Upscrolled, identified in evidence as a haven for antisemitic content, would be the subject of further written submissions concerning how Google and Apple handled complaints about it.

Lancaster noted that cooperation had spanned a wide spectrum, from Anthropic and TikTok, which sent senior executives to Australia to appear, through Meta, Facebook and LinkedIn, “to X itself”.

Regulatory obligations had to be imposed on the platforms, he said, because they were “not taking care of the problem themselves”, and those obligations had to be enforceable in Australia.

Closing the block, Commissioner Bell said it would come as no surprise to those following the Commission’s work that regulation of the online ecosystem to tackle hate speech, and antisemitism in particular, was “very central to the work of this commission”.