A years-long legal standoff between Australian regulators and Elon Musk-owned social media giant X Corp has come to a close, with a national court upholding a substantial fine for the company’s deliberate failure to adhere to national online child safety rules.
The dispute traces back to February 2023, when Australia’s independent online safety regulator eSafety issued a formal transparency request to Twitter, the predecessor of X. The regulator demanded internal information about the platform’s systems and practices for identifying and removing child sexual exploitation material circulating on its service. One month after the request was filed, Twitter completed its merger into X Corp, a corporate restructuring led by Musk.
X initially refused to comply with the information order, arguing that the original legal demand was issued to Twitter — an entity that no longer existed after the merger — and that the new X Corp bore no responsibility to meet the request. For three years, the company fought the regulator’s enforcement action in Australian courts, even after an earlier ruling last year confirmed X was legally obligated to respond to the transparency notice.
On Thursday, X reversed its position and formally admitted to the wrongdoing. Justice Michael Wheelahan of the Australian court ordered the US-based company to pay a total fine of A$610,000, adjusted up from the original 2023 penalty, plus an additional A$100,000 to cover eSafety’s legal costs. The combined penalty amounts to approximately US$463,000, with full payment due within 45 days.
In his ruling, Justice Wheelahan explained that a penalty near the maximum allowed under Australian law was necessary given X’s size and global reach. “A penalty near the maximum is appropriate in the case of the respondent, which is a substantial corporation so that it operates as a real deterrent and is not simply a cost of doing business,” he wrote in his judgment.
This is not the first high-profile clash between X and Australia’s eSafety regulator. The agency has previously taken on the platform over its non-compliance with Australia’s world-first ban on social media use for children under 16, and its refusal to take down graphic footage of a 2024 Sydney church stabbing that spread widely across the platform. Tensions escalated dramatically in 2024, when Musk referred to eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant as a “censorship commissar” in a post to his 196 million X followers. In the aftermath of that post, Grant revealed she received death threats, and her children’s personal information was leaked online in a doxxing attack.
In a public statement released after Thursday’s ruling, Grant emphasized that the outcome reaffirmed the importance of holding large tech platforms accountable for child safety online. “Meaningful transparency is critical to holding technology companies to account,” she said, noting that the information request at the center of the case was designed to shed light on how platforms address the spread of harmful child sexual abuse material.