Communications Minister Anika Wells has personally urged one of Meta’s most senior executives to block a US military execution from being live streamed in Australia later this year.
The country’s online safety watchdog has also written to tech companies asking them “not to show” the planned death by firing squad of wheelchair-bound inmate Nidal Hasan after admitting it was powerless to prevent it.
US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth last week said the execution would be available for the public to watch, but President Donald Trump is now reportedly considering whether to call it off.
Hasan fatally shot 13 unarmed soldiers and injured dozens more at a base in Texas in 2009 and during his 2013 court martial claimed he killed his fellow soldiers to protect Muslims and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Secretary Hegseth said last week.
Minister Wells has now revealed she met with Meta’s global head of safety Antigone Davis on Wednesday to urge the company not to livestream the December 3 execution on Facebook and Instagram.
“We discussed how we might achieve the objective of not having Australians exposed to this, in a scenario where this happens,” Minister Wells told the National Press Club on Thursday.
Noting suggestions that the US President may not go ahead with plans to broadcast the execution, Ms Wells said authorities in Australia were nevertheless preparing for it to happen.
“You would have seen that President Trump has now since said that he’s going to reconsider that decision. It’s scheduled for the 3rd of December. A lot of water to flow under the bridge before we get there.”
“But the eSafety commissioner has written to the platforms about this, putting them on notice,” the communications minister told the Press Club audience which included senior representatives from tech companies such as Ms Davis.
Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young vowed on Thursday to introduce a private members mill to explicitly ensure that foreign executions couldn’t be streamed in Australia.
Senator Hanson-Young told reporters in Canberra she too had met with Meta representatives, as well as other platforms like TikTok, to discuss the issue this week.
“I am very concerned. I raised it directly with Meta and TikTok and told them that any broadcasting sharing or posting of that in Australia is not on and that they should and make sure it doesn’t happen,” she said.
“Of course, we’ve heard from the government on this. Finally, it took them a number of days but they finally said that they too are concerned.
“I’ll be on my feet in the chamber (today) giving notice of a new bill that I will introduce, when we get back in November . . . that will ban the broadcast of live executions.”
This week the eSafety Commission declared it did not have the powers to “proactively prevent a live stream from occurring online” but said services “have responsibilities under Australia’s online safety regulatory framework to protect users from harmful material”.
“As the regulator responsible for enforcing these obligations, eSafety is in regular contact with online platforms and will continue to monitor the situation, considering any action as appropriate,” a spokesperson said.