Richard Lancaster, SC, on Friday said that “although an apparent proponent of unconstrained speech, X has remained silent” in the face of damning evidence that the social media platform was one of the worst perpetrators in proliferating antisemitic hate online.
The corporation’s refusal to engage with the royal commission after repeated attempts to engage them showed “a shocking disregard for the Australian community”.
“X has demonstrated a complete lack of interest in providing transparency concerning a topic as important as keeping Australians safe from the proliferation of terrorist and violent mixed material, including extreme anti-Semitism,” Lancaster said.
He said X Corp’s attitude towards regulating hate speech was perhaps most evident in its response to footage connected with the Bondi Hanukkah attack itself, Lancaster said.
The royal commission earlier heard that Musk’s organisation fought to keep gruesome content relating to the Bondi massacre online, arguing it was no more graphic than a “gore movie”, Australia’s eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant told the royal commission on antisemitism.
Lancaster called X’s inclusion of “page after page” of Holocaust imagery in its submission supporting its position that a video depicting deceased victims of the Bondi Hanukkah attack should be permitted online “should be unequivocally condemned”.
“X Corp’s conduct, both within this commission and outside of it, begs the question whether X Corp has or ought to have a social licence to operate in Australia,” Lancaster said.
Dr Andre Oboler, chief executive officer of the Online Hate Prevention Institute, earlier told the commission that X had been difficult to work with for a decade, and particularly since the platform was bought by Musk, who had significantly downgraded its trust function.
“Dr Oboler has observed that [X] remains a major online contributor to online antisemitism … indeed, Dr Oboler was personally targeted on the platform,” Lancaster said.
Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor at CyberWell, a nonprofit that monitors and counters online antisemitism, told the commission that X’s removal rate for antisemitic content dropped from 54 per cent in 2024 to just above 29 per cent in 2026, making it the platform with the lowest removal rate, Lancaster recalled.
Lancaster said what occurs on social media platforms like X, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok had profound consequences for Australia.
“If social media platforms are capable of inflicting harm or are actually inflicting harm upon Australians, the laws of Australia must be capable of securing accountability for those harms,” he said.
Royal Commissioner Virginia Bell said that regulating the online ecosystem to tackle hate speech and antisemitism in particular was central to the commission’s work.
Earlier on Friday, Counsel Assisting Matt Sherman questioned LinkedIn’s vice president of legal and digital safety about why the professional networking platform did not explicitly include antisemitism as an example of hateful or derogatory content that violated its policies.
Corrigan said that there was no intention to exclude antisemitism from the public-facing community standards, and using the term “Zionist” as a slur in the context of a person who is Jewish was a violation.
Sherman quizzed Corrigan about whether profits were a factor in a policy change in June 2025 that relaxed “strike thresholds” that would ban users from using the platform.
“These changes had nothing to do with revenue,” Corrigan said.
The commission on Friday also heard from the Australian Communications and Media Authority chair, Nerida O’Loughlin, who was asked about a “bizarre limitation” on the media watchdog which prevents it from investigating complaints about streaming content.
“It certainly presents some challenges to us, and I think it also presents some challenges to complainanTS. We’ve had a range of complaints come to us over the last few years which have been out of our jurisdiction,” O’Loughlin told the commission.
“[It] must be very frustrating for a complainant when they’re proposing to complain about something which is on broadcast on the ABC, where they can come to us [but] it was actually a streamed version of a television program.”
O’Loughlin said rules applied to broadcasting services should be the same when they are delivered online.
The royal commission will hold hearings in Melbourne next week, where the focus will be on universities.
Sydney University confirmed on Friday that it would appear.
