Sometimes politics is a simple business. Sometimes you can put aside all the complexity and accept a rudimentary conclusion. Here’s one: you shouldn’t use websites that create child abuse images. This seems a very simple and defensible argument, and yet to some it is apparently insufficiently compelling.
The issue concerns X.com, the site formerly known as Twitter, which Elon Musk has turned into an exploration digger for the moral abyss. His latest experiment involves Grok, his little AI toy. For some time now, users of X have been able to ask Grok to create images of real people stripped of their clothing. Over the new year, this function exploded in popularity.
Needless to say, given the kind of audience Musk has encouraged on X, it was deployed as abusively as possible. Female users of the site were sent non-consensual images of themselves in their underwear. When they protested, there was a fresh wave of abuse and more images, in ever more degrading positions, totaling 6,000 requests per hour. Soon, users began requesting images of the women tied up and gagged, or bruised, or covered in blood. AI-generated images of children also appeared.
This is all uncomplicatedly illegal. Amendments to the Sexual Offences Act criminalise the sharing of non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material. Ofcom has launched an investigation and can impose fines, but more pertinently, it can ban the site in the UK. This would be a wounding experience for Musk. He is obsessed with interfering in British politics, and a ban would scupper that project. But it would also do something more damaging. It would say to other jurisdictions that this can be done. The tech billionaires can be brought to heel. They are susceptible to regulation and enforcement.
Alongside this legal approach, however, there needs to be a civic disengagement. This requires a great herd movement away from the site, which has so far stubbornly refused to take place.
Ministers stayed on X, even after Musk’s algorithm changed it to prioritise far-right content and downgrade mainstream content. Opposition politicians, therefore, stayed. Journalists could therefore insist that they had to stay. Civil society – charities, sporting bodies, cultural groups, think tanks – then claimed they had to stay as well.
Interestingly, there’s evidence that the Prime Minister may have quietly made his decision already. He hasn’t posted on the site for six days now, a notable silence from a usually prolific user. His rhetoric against X.com has also ramped up significantly. “If X cannot control Grok, we will”, he told Labour MPs this week, “and we’ll do it fast because if you profit from harm and abuse, you lose the right to self-regulate.” There are also signs of movement in civil society. Yesterday, Sport England revealed that it had suspended its account. And yet elsewhere, ministers have continued to use the site and defend their presence on it.
This is particularly pitiful on the simple basis of engagement metrics. Under Musk, X throttles traffic and engagement. People’s posts go unread. The days when great floods of internet traffic would come through the site are over. Indeed, Musk appeared to admit that the use of links in a post penalised content, burying it where no one would ever see it.
And yet even this does not seem to have convinced many people to leave. Brain-scrambled, decayed and unwilling to let go of their followers, they keep on pressing refresh and scrolling the feed, gobbling up the far-right content, being used as an editorial meat puppet by the richest man on earth. Rarely before have so many people sacrificed so much of their moral character for so little in return.
Yesterday, minister of state Alex Norris told the BBC that he wanted to stay on the site so he could communicate with voters. How’s that going exactly? Well, at the time of writing, his last post has two likes and two replies. before that was a much greater success, with six likes.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is still regularly posting on X. Yesterday, she insisted, in her usual dreary reactionary style, that she would “stop at nothing to restore order and control to our borders”. She gets much greater engagement, but it’s not the sort you’d want. Literally every reply – bar none – is negative, coming from a right-wing perspective.
“No place in England for you,” one reply reads, a standard bit of racist abuse which now constitutes the meat-and-potatoes experience of the site. Another says: “The Labour Party are so desperate to get the Muslim vote. They will give them whatever they want.” A third insists: “I bet you even have friends using slaves in their houses. It’s all coming out one day, Shabs.”
BBC director general Tim Davie is as stubborn as the Home Secretary. He said last week that he would keep the Corporation on the site to resist global misinformation. How’s that going? The BBC News account has 15 million followers on X.com. Many of its posts have five or six likes. A very successful one might get a few dozen. This is apparently the kind of misinformation battle that Davie thinks it’s worth taking part in.
It’s not just irresponsible, short-sighted and immoral to stay on X. It’s simply pathetic. It is very pitiful indeed to watch these major figures in British public life – the Home Secretary, the BBC director general – scramble around in the dirt for a few dozen likes, for the honour of having some anonymous account hurl abuse at you.
The Ofcom investigation is a good start. It could prove crucial to taking on Musk’s pernicious influence on British politics. But regardless of its outcome, politicians and journalists should make their own decisions about how to proceed. They must show some moral backbone. If you can’t do it over child sex abuse, you won’t do it over anything.
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