Stephen McDermott

ELON MUSK’S X is no stranger to Ireland’s courts.

By the latest count, the company has initiated a dozen separate civil cases against Coimisiún na Meán over its attempts to regulate it as a social media platform under EU law.

This week, it also disclosed that it had funded a criminal defence here.

On Thursday night, X’s Global Government Affairs account announced that the company had funded Kirk Loco’s successful defence against an accusation that he used the platform to share a harmful post about an asylum seeker two years ago.

It celebrated the verdict when revealing the news, proclaiming: “We will keep standing with users who report on matters of public concern.”

What interests me is how a platform decides whose speech is worth spending money to defend, and what it asks the rest of us to conclude from the outcome.

Loco was entitled to defend himself, but X should also be scrutinised over the story it is trying to weave from his acquittal.

Loco, an anti-immigrant campaigner, was charged under Coco’s Law for posting an image of an asylum seeker apparently asleep on a bus in Wicklow, alongside a claim that he had exposed himself to a 14-year-old girl.

He was acquitted after the judge in the case said the alleged victim – the man whose picture was taken – was “a poor historian” when recounting what happened and that his evidence was not credible.

CCTV footage from the bus at the time showed that an international protection applicant moved into a seat with a young woman during the journey.

The bus driver went upstairs to speak to him, but believed – as the judge did this week – that the man was pretending to be asleep because he knew he had “crossed the line” and feared he was in trouble.

The judge also said it was clear that he had approached the first woman and that the contact was “clearly unwelcome” and more than likely of a sexual nature.

His legal team argued that the post was “substantively true”; the judge dismissed the charge.

After X’s announcement on Thursday evening, Loco revealed how the company’s backing had another international dimension.

He explained that Ezra Levant, a Canadian far-right broadcaster behind Rebel News, had pressed the company’s legal department to support his case.

I wasn’t familiar with Levant until videos of his monologues outside Bray courthouse were pushed to me on social media in February.

He has shown up in Ireland multiple times lately, mainly to report on the case involving Loco but also to attach himself to other causes, like the fuel price protests in April.

Like Tommy Robinson, he has embraced Ireland as a place where he can produce culture war content for an insatiable far-right audience that wants stories about the dangers of immigration, supposed censorship and the decline of the West.

The prosecution deserved scrutiny regardless of Loco’s politics, and his acquittal was plainly newsworthy, regardless of his politics or what anyone thinks of the rest of his social media output.

It’s standard journalistic practice for a foreign reporter to visit a country to examine legal proceedings, something that happens all the time here.

I visited Greece in 2023 to report on the case of Sean Binder when he was accused and later acquitted of people trafficking because he helped asylum seekers crossing the sea to the island of Lesbos.

Accepting that, however, doesn’t require us to accept every claim made around this case or suggest that all of Levant’s reporting is journalistically sound.

Across his visits, he declared Loco’s version of events to be true before the court had even heard all the evidence.

In Ireland, court reporters avoid offering any analysis or opinion until a case closes, in part because judges tend to frown upon their doing so.

He remarked negatively about the investigation itself, while also admitting that he did not know “all the details about the police investigation”.

He also repeatedly claimed, incorrectly, that Loco was charged under a 1976 “fake news” law, when the actual charge was under legislation enacted in 2020.

Kirk Loco outside Bray District Court on Thursday

Levant’s involvement extended beyond reporting.

In February, Loco announced a project with Levant and Rebel News to assist Irish people he described as “unfairly persecuted” by the authorities.

Loco’s wider output includes calls for “mass deportations” and support for opposition to the Coolock accommodation centre; after his acquittal, he urged followers to fund other cases.

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Those views did not diminish his entitlement to a fair hearing, but they provided context for the wider campaign around Loco’s case that spun a narrative that it was a case of citizen journalism against censorship.

After his acquittal, Loco urged followers to continue donating towards other cases.

The outcome of the case has helped establish a broader mythos online that the State is punishing those who speak out against immigration and that criticism is being dangerously quashed.

To me, the appeal of this story for X is clear: it offers a vivid example around which to argue that Irish speech laws overreach.

That argument still needs to be assessed separately from the company’s disputes with the media regulator.

Coco’s Law is best known for tackling intimate image abuse, and criminalises threatening or grossly offensive communications intended to cause harm.

This prosecution was a novel use of the legislation that raised a philosophical question around its purpose and whether publishing a one-off allegation about someone can be deemed to cross the line into criminal abuse.

However, this felt like a clunky use of a law named after a cyberbullying victim: even if Loco’s allegation had not been deemed to be well-founded, it’s questionable whether his post was grossly offensive or threatening on its own.

X criticised Coco’s Law and the free speech argument is one it is entitled to make, but Loco’s acquittal and a platform’s broader assessment of Irish speech laws are different propositions.

Musk previously said in 2024 that X would fund challenges to proposed Irish hate-speech legislation.

This case involved a different law, and the hate-speech legislation never actually happened, but it makes the company’s willingness to support Irish legal proceedings tangible, especially when another beneficiary is X itself if it helps the platform retain or draw more users.

And Musk’s politics are also relevant when one asks who gets X’s backing in legal cases and why.

Would a user without Levant’s contacts receive the same support? Would someone whose politics conflicted with Musk’s?

Loco’s acquittal deserved to be reported on its own terms, but it doesn’t settle the wider argument about how Ireland should regulate speech, however useful X finds it in making that argument.