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Jacinda Ardern says she expects Twitter to play its part to eradicate extremist content, revealing the New Zealand government intervened to ask Elon Musk's platform to delete videos of the Christchurch Mosques massacre.
The livestream of the 2019 terrorist attack, carried out by radicalised Australian Brenton Tarrant, has circulated on Twitter in recent days.
The uploading of the videos runs contrary to Twitter's commitment to the Christchurch Call, an international agreement between countries and tech companies to eliminate online hate.
Ms Ardern, who founded the Christchurch Call with French President Emmanuel Macron, said membership of the call put the onus on Twitter to delete it.
"In recent times we have seen reports of additional postings of the terrorist video from March 15. (New Zealand) officials have acted quickly to raise with Twitter where we have seen it," she said.
Twitter's automated function reportedly did not pick up the footage.
Ms Ardern noted the upheaval at the social media platform under the new ownership of Mr Musk, but said she didn't expect the company to waiver from its commitment to the Christchurch Call.
"Time will tell," she said.
"Obviously some of the layoffs we've seen have been in the content management space.
"The advice that we've received from Twitter is that they have not changed their view on (Christchurch Call) membership.
"We will continue to maintain our expectation that they do everything they can on a day-to-day basis to remove that content, but also to reduce terrorist content and violent extremist content online as they've committed to."
Mr Musk has placed freedom of speech at the centre of his ownership, restoring previously blocked accounts including former US president Donald Trump and antisemitic rapper Kanye West.
Despite his commitment to free speech, Mr Musk has showed some limit in the content he is willing to accept, denying an invitation to re-instate conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
Tarrant last month announced an appeal to his life sentence.
