Not for the first time, British politicians are playing catch-up with Elon Musk. He may be the world’s richest man, but he still sees himself as an adolescent disruptor.
X users found last month that they could ask AI chatbot Grok to manipulate images – for example by putting a fully dressed woman in a bikini – and post them online. The episode has highlighted how underprepared the UK is to deal with the regulatory and ethical questions posed by AI and social media, and thrown up questions about whether the Online Safety Act, years in the planning and implementation, already needs updating.
Grok, in contrast to other prominent chatbots, does not place substantial restrictions on users or prohibit them from producing sexualised content involving real individuals, even though other generative AI technologies, such as those from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, are actively working to minimise the generation of such intrusive content. The Internet Watch Foundation charity said it found “sexualised and topless imagery of girls” on a dark web forum in which users claimed they used Grok to create the imagery.
But because Musk has positioned Grok as a more entertaining and informal chatbot, emphasising X’s commitment to freedom of expression, he is seeking to make the argument that anyone opposing the nudification of women and children is somehow a danger to liberty. He is wilfully mixing up freedom of expression and nefarious – and possibly criminal – activity online.
Musk’s stance poses another headache for ministers, already at odds with Donald Trump’s administration over its colonial designs on Greenland. Despite resigning from his position within the US administration last year following a disagreement, Musk continues to be a prominent figure within the Maga movement. In Maga-world, it is axiomatic that European attempts to regulate social media companies are an attack on US free speech. True to form, the world’s richest man accused the British Government on Saturday of being “fascist” and of looking for “any excuse for censorship”.
Last week, JD Vance, the Vice President, told a visiting Justice Secretary David Lammy that permitting an AI application to simulate the sexual undressing of children was unacceptable. But shortly afterwards, Sarah Rogers, the under-secretary of state for public diplomacy and free speech tsar, used social media to criticise the UK for a “Russia-style” ban on the platform in order to shield its cowering populace from bikini imagery.
In London, that free speech argument was echoed on Monday by Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader. “Nothing from the current set of regulators in Government would surprise me when it comes to the suppression of free speech. Do we like and welcome the particular feature on Grok that has made the news over the weekend? No. But let’s talk to Grok. They have already made one or two steps in our direction. My fear is we will end up suppressing Grok and further suppressing free speech and we do not want to do that,” he said.
It would be wrong to assume Musk has the monopoly on attitudes in the US. The idea that Bible-belt Republicans favour free speech at all costs is not true. Even Melania Trump’s “Be Best” campaign has focused on youth well-being and combating cyber bullying, and has been expanded to include combating revenge porn during her second term as First Lady. In putting free speech above online protections, Musk – and by extension Farage – are in the minority on this issue.
Yet, there is little incentive for Farage to challenge Musk. X users who are verified earn money based on the amount of engagement they generate. According to the register of MPs’ interests, Farage was paid just over £10,000 by X in 2025, while Reform MPs Lee Anderson and Richard Tice were each paid about £3,500.
A November YouGov poll found only 5 per cent of adults strongly oppose banning children from social media, including sites such as X and TikTok. Short of barring X altogether, this seems like a natural next step. Unless British MPs quit X en masse, there is little incentive for Musk to change his ways.
In a smart political move, Kemi Badenoch announced on Sunday that a Conservative government would institute such a ban. Having said it would wait to see the outcome of similar changes in Australia, it now seems inevitable the Government will play catch-up in the coming months or years.
That’s because the campaign is not just coming from the right of politics. Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester Mayor and potential future Labour leadership contender, said he agreed with Badenoch. One of the country’s biggest teaching unions, NASUWT, called for a social media ban for under-16s over concerns about mental health and concentration.
And other legislators are ahead of the Government. A cross-party effort in the House of Lords to amend the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to introduce a ban on Grok will be introduced shortly.
Peers are also busy tabling amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill to ban the recreation of porn that encourages an interest in child sexual abuse material, such as the depiction of incest and the glorification of child sexual abuse on chat forums. Currently pornography which uses childlike adult actors to recreate content that looks exactly like child sexual abuse is legal.
More widely they are also seeking to bring greater parity to the law which would see the same regulation and standards apply to online pornography that are applied to offline porn. Quite incredibly, as it stands at the moment, online porn has no legal requirement to meet the same standards as porn distributed on DVDs or Blu-ray. They will also call for consent checks and age checks on performers.
“The British Board of Film Classification has offered to work with Ofcom to apply spot checks on standards – the Government should take this offer seriously. But in any case, there needs to be a far more proactive monitoring and reporting system that works for victims,” Gabby Bertin, a Conservative peer, told The i Paper. “Tougher laws and regulation are needed but the actual enforcement of the law is key.”
The Lords will also seek to introduce an ombudsman function to Ofcom, to allow victims of nudification or other abuse a place to report directly to the regulator. Currently injured parties can complain either to the host site or to an overstretched police force.
Although ministers have floated the potential of prohibiting X, only Ofcom, the independent regulator, holds the authority to do so. Ofcom’s investigation, announced Monday, will assess whether X has carried out its duties under the Online Safety Act, which requires it to take down illegal content and prevent users from seeing deepfake nudes.
While the Government is publicly backing the regulator, ministers are nonetheless urging speed. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall urged the regulator to act quickly because “the public – and most importantly the victims – will not accept any delay”, adding that: “The content created and shared using Grok in recent days has been deeply disturbing”.
The public and campaigners are rightly frustrated that the Online Safety Act took so many years to pass into law, after disagreements about where the balance lay between free speech and online harm. Ofcom has also faced criticism for its incredibly slow, phased, implementation. Some parts of the Act are still not fully in place.
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“There was always going to be a mismatch between what politicians and the public expected of the Online Safety Act and what it can achieve when it is playing catch-up with Big Tech changes all the time,” according to a source who has worked both in government and for Ofcom.
Even so, there is action ministers could take – and soon. It’s welcome that Kendall has announced a new law making the creation of non-consensual intimate images illegal, but she can also enact secondary legislation to strip out the more contentious free speech issues cluttering up the Act.
That would draw attention to the main thrust of the legislation, which is to protect the vulnerable. It would also stop people like Musk and Farage from conflating the issue of free speech and what is genuinely harmful.
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