Anthony Albanese: If you posted photos or video of the Westfield Bondi Junction stabbing you’ve done the WRONG thing

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has issued a stern warning to social media users and platforms after misinformation spread about the identity of the Bondi Junction stabbing and angry reports led to riots when a bishop was stabbed.

Six people were fatally stabbed in a rampage at the Westfield shopping center in Sydney’s east on Saturday, which only ended when a brave police officer shot dead attacker Joel Cauchi.

Harrowing images quickly spread across social media platforms – namely X and Facebook – sparking online witch hunts, with an innocent person wrongly named as the perpetrator.

In addition, explicit and violent images ended up on news feeds and ‘For You’ pages around the world, prompting an intervention from the government’s e-Safety Commissioner.

Similarly, footage of a 16-year-old boy allegedly stabbing Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel during a live-streamed sermon at Christ The Good Shepherd Church in Wakely went viral, with voice notes and WhatsApp messages fueling the riots.

In the days after the tragedy and again on Friday, Mr Albanese has criticized social media platforms for not acting faster to protect users.

“There should be no need for the eSafety Commissioner to intervene to direct companies, in this case X and [Facebook owner] Meta, to remove violent videos showing people who lost their lives as a result of what happened when the perpetrator committed that atrocity on Saturday,” he said.

“Social media makes us all content publishers, we all have a responsibility.”

The Prime Minister warned that he is “prepared to take whatever measures are necessary to bring these companies into line.”

‘We have made that very clear because of the damage that an omission can have.’

Mr Albanese said onlookers who shot the video, and others who later received the footage, should have sent it to police to help with the investigation, rather than posting it online.

‘I also make the point that the police made last Saturday, which is that for people who had video footage from last Saturday, their first thought should not have been to put it online.

‘Their first thought should have been to forward it to the police to aid their investigation. We all do, because social media turns us all into content publishers. We all have a responsibility.’

Mr Albanese said social media companies need to “understand their social responsibility that they also have to others, because that is where they get their social license.”

Earlier this week, the Prime Minister described social media as a ‘plague in many ways’.

‘It must be said that there has been a lack of responsibility, as well as from some of the social media operators we know about allowing content to be spread that is clearly disinformation.’

He criticized the Seven Network for picking up misinformation, such as the innocent university student wrongly named as the perpetrator, and putting it on the news.

“How come a mainstream media organization just put that on the market?” he said.

The student has a common Jewish surname and was targeted by anti-Semitic social media pages.

Mr Albanese said traditional media also have a responsibility to be accurate and fair.

The Prime Minister has made no secret of his aversion to social media.

During a wide-ranging interview with former Melbourne talkback host Neil Mitchell in 2023, he was asked a hypothetical question about what he would do if he became a dictator.

He said banning social media “would be useful.”

‘Keyboard fighters who can say anything anonymously and without any fear; The kinds of things that they would never say to you in person, they can just state as fact and that worries me,” he said.

“What that does, combined with the pressures on modern journalists, is make them really obsessed with the short-term cycle.”

Mr. Albanese was quick to declare that he was not, in fact, “in favor of dictatorships.”

According to the latest annual report, almost 500 public servants are employed by the eSafety Commissioner and the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

The eSafety Commissioner praises itself as the ‘first government agency committed to keeping its citizens safer online’.

It is run by Julie Inman-Grant, Twitter’s former director of Public Policy, Australia and Southeast Asia, who receives an annual salary of almost $445,000.

Mr Albanese said part of his government’s strong action includes quadrupling funding for the eSafety Commissioner.