SYDNEY, April 23 (Reuters) - Elon Musk lashed out at

Australia's prime minister on Tuesday after a court ordered his

social media company X to take down footage of an alleged

terrorist attack in Sydney, and said the ruling meant any

country could control "the entire internet".

At a hearing overnight, Australia's Federal Court ordered X,

formerly called Twitter, to temporarily hide posts showing video

of the incident a week earlier, in which a teenager was charged

with terrorism for knifing an Assyrian priest and others.

X said it had already blocked the posts from Australian

users, but Australia's e-Safety Commissioner had said the

content should be taken down since it showed explicit violence.

Billionaire Musk, who bought X in 2022 with a declared

mission to save free speech, posted a meme on the platform that

showed X stood for "free speech and truth" while other social

media platforms represented "censorship and propaganda".

"Don't take my word for it, just ask the Australian PM!" he

wrote alongside the post.

In another post, Musk wrote that the company's "concern is

that if ANY country is allowed to censor content for ALL

countries, which is what the Australian 'eSafety Commissar' is

demanding, then what is to stop any country from controlling the

entire Internet?"

The pushback by the world's third-richest person sets up a

new front in the battle between the world's largest internet

platforms and countries and nonprofits seeking more oversight of

the content hosted on them.

Last month, a U.S. judge threw out a lawsuit by X against

the hate speech watchdog, Center for Countering Digital Hate. In

Australia, the e-Safety Commissioner fined X A$610,500 last year

for failing to cooperate with a probe on anti-child abuse

practices; X is fighting that penalty in court.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese hit back at Musk,

saying the country would "do what's necessary to take on this

arrogant billionaire who thinks he's above the law, but also

above common decency".

"The idea that someone would go to court for the right to

put up violent content on a platform shows how out-of-touch Mr

Musk is," Albanese told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Spokespeople for X and the e-Safety Commissioner were not

immediately available for comment.

Although Musk wrote in another post that X had made the

attack footage "inaccessible to Australian IP addresses", a

Reuters reporter in Australia was able to view to content.

On Tuesday, Facebook and Instagram owner Meta said

it had used "internal tools" to detect and block copies of

videos of the church attack and an unrelated, deadly stabbing at

a shopping mall in Sydney two days earlier.

Meta said it was removing posts containing "any

glorification or praise" of the incidents.

Alice Dawkins, executive director of internet policy

non-profit Reset.Tech Australia, said Musk's comments fit "the

company's chaotic and negligent approach to the most basic user

safety considerations that under previous leadership, the

platform used to take seriously."