Elon Musk’s X loses Australia child protection compliance lawsuit

SYDNEY: ​An Australian court upheld a regulator’s fine against Elon Musk’s social media company X Corp after it admitted violating the law by failing to supply information about its online child protection measures, ending a nearly three-year dispute.After the eSafety regulator, a frequent target of ⁠online attacks by Musk, fined the company in October 2023 for what it called an inadequate response to a standard request for information about anti-child exploitation processes, the company resolved the dispute on Thursday ‌by admitting wrongdoing.”The respondent admits that it contravened the Act,” said Christopher Tran, a lawyer for the eSafety Commissioner, referring to Australia’s Online ‌Safety Act, in a Federal Court hearing.”There was ongoing noncompliance ‌for some 38 days.”The resolution ends a legal battle ‌which began when the regulator fined ‌the company formerly called Twitter A$610,500 ($437,000) over its answers to some 25 questions. X ​Corp initially sought to ‌overturn the penalty ​on grounds that the company had changed ⁠its name since being acquired by Musk for $44 billion in 2022. The regulator later took a separate legal action to recover the fine. ​On Thursday, ⁠Judge Michael Wheelahan ⁠raised the payout to A$650,000 and ordered X to pay another A$100,000 to cover some of the regulator’s legal costs. The resolution ties up ⁠a loose end for the company which earlier this year was folded into Musk’s sprawling technology conglomerate SpaceX ahead of a planned trillion-dollar initial public offering within weeks.X’s lawyer Perry Herzfeld said the dispute boiled down to “historic issues relating to the timeliness of ‌provision of information”.The contravening conduct took place during a “period of change and transition for the company”, ​he told the court.Tran, for eSafety, acknowledged there was no loss resulting from X’s actions but said that “not providing information when requested by a regulator impedes a regulator when doing her work”.