After Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was attacked at his church in Sydney, the video taken from a live stream quickly went viral on X.

Australian officials, and politicians from both sides of the spectrum immediately called for the footage to be removed, yet Elon Musk has refused to do so, saying that X is a platform for freedom of expression and it will not censor content that is not illegal.

Australia's so called 'eSafety Commissioner' Julie Inman-Grant, an unelected official, has ordered both X and Meta to remove footage of the stabbing under the Online Safety Act, passed in 2021, which empowers the eSafety department to demand the removal of so-called 'class 1 material'.

X was ordered by the Australian Federal Court on Monday to block all users from viewing the footage.

The platform temporarily complied with the order in Australia while taking out a two-day injunction, but asserted that a global takedown order violates freedom of speech.

"We have already censored the content in question for Australia, pending legal appeal, and it is stored only on servers in the USA," Musk noted in an X post, warning that complying with government demands to ban content is a slippery slope.

In comments to Sky News, Independent Australian Senator Jacqui Lambie charged that Musk is "creating hatred" by ignoring requests to remove "harmful content."