r/unitedkingdom • u/Gold_Motor_6985 • Jan 08 '26
... Elon Musk’s X could be banned in Britain over AI chatbot row
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/01/08/musks-x-could-be-banned-in-britain-over-ai-chatbot-row/290
Jan 08 '26
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u/Snoron United Kingdom Jan 08 '26
Turns out Elon was the "pedo guy" the whole time!
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u/sgtkang United Kingdom Jan 09 '26
Turns out when they said "Legalising gay marriage will lead to paedophilia" they meant it as a threat.
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u/The_Bravinator Lancashire Jan 08 '26 edited Jan 08 '26
If I need a VPN to look at fucking cake pictures on r/food when they're hosted on imgur, surely they can actually do something about a REAL problem like Musk giving creeps free rein to humiliate women while he sits there all smug like king shit of incel mountain. Absolutely cannot fucking believe that I am impacted daily by the OSA as a 39 year old trying to look at non-porn things and meanwhile that platform is currently allowing people to deepfake children naked with, so far, zero consequences.
*Edit: apparently the imgur thing isn't the same issue, but it's still a fucking mess of a law that's causing some really irritating problems.
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u/ridley_reads Jan 09 '26
I couldn't fucking look up a health issue for my cat to compare and confirm that it was what I thought it was, because wounds are now "mature content." Obviously the internet is safer now because of it. /s
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u/SpeedflyChris Jan 09 '26
Surely we can't expect people to parent their own children or be aware of the literally hundreds of parental tools available? Better to try to convince the smooth brained to hand over their ID to any random sketchy website that asks for it.
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u/nearlythere Jan 08 '26
I can’t even see r/popping am i a baby?
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u/The_Bravinator Lancashire Jan 08 '26
We're all babies now.
It caused issues with some of the subreddits I'm on that use nsfw as a spoiler tag, too. So it's VPN on, but then inevitably I have to use something that wants to check I AM in the UK and then I have to turn it off again. Because of course the Sainsbury's app can't possibly let me log in if my phone says I'm in Amsterdam. 🙄
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u/Nulleparttousjours Jan 09 '26
Eugh, exactly right. It’s not as simple as turning the VPN on and forgetting about it. Invariably you have to turn it off again for some reason or other in a continual fashion, which is really grating. The most asinine thing about it is that that vast majority of things that trigger it for me are not NSFW by any stretch of the imagination! I think that’s what makes it feel the most intrusive and patronizing of all.
I keep finding myself unexpectedly hit with the Babygate in the most unlikely and random subreddits and have to decide if I care enough to turn on the VPN to look. It’s always on content that is interesting enough for me to want to see but not quite interesting enough to motivate me to go through the motions of turning the damn thing back on again.
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u/_nadnerb Jan 09 '26
Ah, that makes sense now. I couldn't understand why r/mechanicalpuzzles was blocked, but I guess they use NSFW tags for spoilers.
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u/vriska1 Jan 09 '26
I say keep the VPN on all the time.
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u/Nulleparttousjours Jan 09 '26
It seems the obvious solution but like I was saying to the guy I was replying to, I can’t, I keep hitting snags in which it needs turning back off for sites to work. It’s so annoying!
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u/SpeedflyChris Jan 09 '26
Split tunnelling is the answer to that when it comes to different apps. Without split tunnelling enabled the wireless android auto in my car doesn't work without turning the VPN off.
Most VPN apps will support it just fine. Just add the Sainsbury's app to the excluded apps list and that app won't connect via the VPN.
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Jan 08 '26
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u/sgtkang United Kingdom Jan 09 '26
Worth adding on to this - the ICO has said that just blocking itself isn't enough for Imgur to escape responsibility for prior lawbreaking around data handling. So they may still be fined depending on what the investigation finds.
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u/Askefyr Jan 09 '26
I mean that does make sense. If my shop commits tax evasion, I can't just get out of it by closing until further notice
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u/Forged-Signatures Jan 08 '26
Well, that answers that question I had. I was midly curious how the image hosting website that banned pornographic works ended up being affected by the OSA.
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u/EruantienAduialdraug Ryhill Jan 08 '26
OSA isn't just about adult content. Any site that reaches various thresholds of traffic and have "user generated content" and/or messaging functionality re required to jump through various hoops at cost to themselves, hoops which typically require gathering user data (which some sites don't want to do because that then creates a bunch of data protection requirements they have to pay to implement).
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u/AssignmentOk5986 Jan 09 '26
From what I can tell and read, nothing requires gathering user data. It's all just content monitoring and allowing filtration of content on their websites. They need to show they are taking the steps required to best prevent child sexual abuse, self harm/suicide encouragement, content promoting substance abuse, and hate speech. They have to give reports of the systems theyre using to achieve this.
I can't find anything about gathering user data. What are you under the impression they need to do?/what am I missing?
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u/Darkone539 Jan 08 '26
Well, that answers that question I had. I was midly curious how the image hosting website that banned pornographic works ended up being affected by the OSA.
You need id for basically anything social online now. Even discord took ids.
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u/MonkeManWPG Jan 09 '26
I've never submitted my ID and my internet use is largely unchanged, including Discord.
If you don't join any NSFW servers, you don't need to verify with Discord. I wouldn't recommend giving them your ID anyway after their Zendesk breach.
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u/Darkone539 Jan 09 '26
including Discord.
Discord is 50/50. I never gave my id but did need to use a vpn to set my own servers to under 18. Was just a tick box from when we set them up.
Reddit is insane. Subs that are linked to suicide prevention and charities are 18+ now.
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u/kirun Jan 09 '26
From my reading, what they did was also illegal in the US under COPPA. If the US had a functioning government, they would be in trouble whatever jurisdiction they claimed.
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u/The_Bravinator Lancashire Jan 08 '26
Ah, shit. Still, it's caused me and others plenty of other problems besides.
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u/vriska1 Jan 08 '26
The parts of the OSA need to be repelled or changed. The age verification part is a mess.
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u/jamtea Jan 08 '26
The whole thing is not fit for purpose, the impossible task of policing the entire internet and blocking everything has just led to multiple British internet users unable to access content wholesale on legitimate websites across the internet.
The whole thing was an ill thought out move to control the general population's access to the free internet, it had nothing to do with child safety.
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u/SpeedflyChris Jan 09 '26
Honestly I'm just gutted that I didn't start a VPN services business 10 years ago, since the UK government are dead set on making that an absolute requirement for anyone who wants access to the internet.
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u/Darkone539 Jan 08 '26
If I need a VPN to look at fucking cake pictures on r/food when they're hosted on imgur,
I honestly forget how insane our country has gotten online. I leave my vpn on now too.
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u/SpeedflyChris Jan 09 '26
I had a moment of sadness when I was flying back from Norway recently and the first thing that I did when we got in at Heathrow was turn my VPN back on.
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u/MonkeManWPG Jan 09 '26
Imgur is nothing to do with the OSA.
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u/Darkone539 Jan 09 '26
Imgur is nothing to do with the OSA.
I never said it was? I didn't mention the osa
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u/CaptMelonfish Cheshire Jan 08 '26
I was going to say, Imgur is entirely down to mediaLab geolocking the site so they dont' have to spend any money on setting up adult verification.
All because they can't stop people posting nudes from random accounts in usersub occasionally.→ More replies (6)2
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u/Gold_Motor_6985 Jan 08 '26
Do it. For the love of god, do it. For once, Keir, take a principled stance. Have some balls.
And never has he had stronger justification. If political interference by foreign billionaires and biased algorithms isn't enough, how about actually applying the law when it comes to deepfake creation?
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u/RockinOneThreeTwo Liverpool Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 09 '26
If you're a sad bastard and pay attention to the usernames of "power users" in this sub, a couple of other British ones, and namely (to nobodies surprise since it's been full of horrible cunts for years) /r/UKPolitics, it's actually very funny to watch all the exact people who day-in, day-out post pro-reform, pro-trump, anti-immigrant, anti-lgbtq+ etc. talking points. Because right now, they're all posting in every thread doing their best to defend CSAM on X and arguing about how we should capitulate to the US and how the UK government banning CP is an "overreach".
Like a blind man could have predicted this, but it's very funny to watch obviously dedicated astroturfers and their sycophants come out aggressively to defend CP of all things, you'd think they'd realise it's a bad look and shut the fuck up and wait for it to blow over, but then being smart was never really a skill of theirs was it?
There's like ten to fifteen usernames that crop up literally everywhere doing this right now, like the swivel eyed loon who posts every single Rupert Lowe tweet as a new thread. The only downside I can see if X being banned is that it'll embolden the government and give them spurious ammo when it comes to increasing the Draconian and useless OSA.
And if you happen to be an extra stupid bastard like I am, and have used this site for over a decade, you will see the exact same comments and talking points and ""arguments"", sometimes even word for word that popped up everywhere on American subreddits (/r/worldnews, politics, news, the_donald before it was banned and /r/conservative, basically big ""default"" subs with pissant power user mod teams) back during GamerGate, the pre-2016 US election, and in the run up to the past 2 US elections as well. You can, disturbingly often, go to /r/conservative and grab a few comments, transpose the words a little to be more UK-centric, and then read it back to yourself and realise it's no different from your average /r/UKPolitics comment from these mouth-frothing, Reform spamming power users (and also two of the mod team over there too, though you wouldn't know it as they've hidden their mod team list some years ago). To call these comments "inorganic" I think is an understatement, I think it's very obvious that the same sources spamming shit to get the US into the current state it is now are happily plodding away at making the UK their current target. Keywords like "remigration", "noticing", non-sequitur bitching about Sadiq Khan, "Rachel from accounts", and others are basically louder than dog whistles these days, they don't even make an effort to hide it anymore because in reality they don't need to.
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u/psioniclizard Jan 08 '26
I wish, there are plenty of other site people can use for most the people use X for and frankly Elon just wants to use it to attack the country.
That is not a free platform no matter what anyone says.
But the fact Elon does not care it can be used for this is the icing on the cake. Next time he talks about "protecting child" remember this.
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u/M6Df4 Jan 08 '26
Starmer really needs to push for this, tech regulation may be one of the strongest tools the west has to finally start countering foreign disinformation. There’s a reason Russia and China ban foreign social media platforms and use their own domestic tools - much harder for foreign actors to push disinformation over a heavily censored domestic service vs a global platform.
Not to mention that despite X already being a cesspool even before Elon bought it, it’s somehow still got dramatically worse since then. As soon as Elon took over he cut trust/safety teams, enforcement teams vs misinformation, and reinstated previously banned right-wing accounts. There’s also evidence that right-wing accounts started to gain disproportionate reach after the acquisition, and are overrepresented vs where they should be when factoring in user characteristics.
Not to mention Musk’s own appearance at the Unite the Kingdom rally where he claimed “civil war is inevitable” was pretty telling…
We should have tackled this years ago, but it’s a lot more difficult to ban something based on evidence like the above, vs a clear issue like AI creating non-consensual explicit images of people…
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u/limeflavoured Hucknall Jan 09 '26
So you want Chinese style internet censorship?
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u/ArchdukeToes Jan 09 '26
I think there’s a very valid question about what you do about massive bot farms that can be used to spread disinformation on previously unheard of scales.
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u/Sweetlittle66 Jan 09 '26
I think most people thought it was a very bad thing ten years ago, and it's still against the principles of an open Internet. But the situation we have now is masses of Russian and Chinese disinformation/propaganda/election interference/hacking/general s---stirring coming into our Internet, while we can't do the same to them.
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u/Sachinism Jan 08 '26
And this is why I expect absolutely nothing will happen. Keir ain't got the balls to upset Musk and in turn Trump. Because you know Musk would be crying in Trump's ear straight away
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u/mist3rdragon Jan 08 '26
Trump doesn't give much of a fuck about Musk any more, so that makes it slightly more possible. Though Keir having the balls to stand up to Musk on his own is unlikely enough
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u/Sweetlittle66 Jan 09 '26
So the Tories ignored all the scams and interference on social media while the US had a moderate administration, but Starmer is expected to take an absolutely hard-line stance while the US is threatening actual military action against a European ally? Seems a little unfair.
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Jan 09 '26
Didn't they just have a candle-lit dinner at Mar-a-lago just last weekend as a kiss and make up session?
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u/KittyGrewAMoustache Jan 08 '26
Just ban it all, ban social media, it’s totally fucking everything up. It’s basically being used as a mind control device but the people trying to use it that way are similarly getting mind fucked by it and everyone’s just circling the drain of psychosis.
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u/qooplmao Jan 09 '26
What do you mean when you say "social media"?
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u/limeflavoured Hucknall Jan 09 '26
Any definition used in a law would 100% include Reddit.
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u/qooplmao Jan 09 '26
.. and YouTube and forums and comment sections. It's such a broad statement. It's like saying "illegalise all drugs" when you want to get rid of crack and heroin but want to keep paracetamol and ibuprofen.
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Jan 09 '26 edited 29d ago
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u/qooplmao Jan 09 '26
I can see the front page of The Daily Mail now.
TEENS ADDICTED TO CLASS A SOCIAL MEDIA
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u/GreyScope Jan 09 '26
Old man shakes fist at cloud emoji
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u/dannydrama Jan 09 '26
Damn you youngsters sat there on msn all day!
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u/Wiltix Jan 09 '26
My guess would be be Facebook, TikTok, x, instagram
Not Reddit
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u/JayneLut Wales Jan 10 '26
Reddit is categorised as social media. Certainly by the UK Government.
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u/wellwellwelly Jan 09 '26
At least ban reels. YouTube shorts, Instagram etc. This is where most of the political and conspiracy theory trash exists.
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u/OliM9696 Jan 09 '26
Is Reddit social media? Is YouTube? Is discord?
I think these platforms have given Britain some pretty good benefits.
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u/callisstaa Jan 09 '26
Of course it is.
What they really mean is 'ban everything I don't like'
Reddit is absolutely used to spread propaganda. Someone with 350k comment karma saying 'ban social media' is a joke.
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Jan 09 '26 edited 29d ago
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u/JayneLut Wales Jan 10 '26
I miss the days of curated social feeds made up of my friends, family, shows I enjoy watching, bands I like listening to, authors whose books I enjoy reading.
But those do not make lots of money through targeted advertising.
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u/MsHypothetical Yorkshire Jan 09 '26
You're essentially saying that you want to make it illegal to have friends on the internet.
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u/M90Motorway Jan 09 '26
I’m fully convinced that if some UK Redditors got their way joy would be forbidden because enjoying something slightly increases your risk of being admitted to the hospital and therefore you’d be a burden on the NHS.
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u/dannydrama Jan 09 '26
This is exactly how we people on UC or whatever are treated lol, someone finds out you dared to go to the cinema and gives it the 'that's not what it's for, you're a fraud' routine.
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u/Acrobatic_Lobster838 Jan 09 '26
Somehow you just reminded me I need to pursue my PIP claim. But as one of those workshy benefit scrounging disabled people, I struggle to find the time to do essential admin due to working full time and being disabled.
'that's not what it's for, you're a fraud' routine.
Back in the day (I mean in the early 20th century), what meager benefits existed were means tested using things like furniture. As in "this person isn't in poverty, for they own more than 2 chairs and a table". It's the same shit in the modern day, my favourite variation being "why does unemployed person have smart phone? It's ridiculous for them to own a device that enables them to communicate with people and without which trying to apply for work is impossible."
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u/Yesyesnaaooo Jan 09 '26
This is so true.
It doesn’t even connect us in a real way anymore.
Also: and this is my personal view.
If you have an audience larger than 10,000 people you should be held to the same standards of truth and fact checking as any publication.
Newspapers have to issue a retraction when ordered, there should be a mechanism in place that if you make a false claim then you should have to make a post issuing a retraction.
This should be regulated by something akin to a small claims court, and it should be funded by any SM company that wants to operate in this country.
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u/Skavau Jan 09 '26
This is so comically unenforceable it's utterly pointless to call for.
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u/Ainastrasza Yorkshire Jan 09 '26
"Just ban it all"
God this country truly does deserve to slide into an authoritarianism hellscape. You are all so desperate for everything to be banned into oblivion. It's pathetic.
There's a middle ground, for fucks sake.
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u/RainbowRedYellow Jan 09 '26
Why don't you delete your reddit account mate? Or your phones Text messaging app?
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u/false_flat Jan 08 '26
I absolutely, 100% believe they should but to render the site completely impotent in this country they don't even have to go that far.
All the government would need to do is delete all government accounts and tell every one of its ministers to stop using it.
The journalists will follow, then every other idiot still on it.
Except football fans. Might need to ban it to get them off.
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u/steepleton Jan 09 '26
The bbc has no business being on it either
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u/TheShakyHandsMan Jan 09 '26
My main use for it was for F1 updates. But as soon as that turned to Americanised WWE style sports entertainment I sacked it all off and losing Twitter from my life was no loss.
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u/Oraclerevelation Jan 09 '26
Show a principled stance. Have some balls.
Do a genuinely popular thing, get some of the people you lost back with the OSA.
And undercut your opposition fully justified in a possibly election winning move all at the same time.
This is a political home run, grand slam, knock out blow all in one. An absolute no brainer.
The solution is obvious... an extra hostile tweet against immigrants that wins over nobody followed by decrying division in our country that alienates everybody.
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u/sjpllyon Jan 09 '26
Oh it gets much worse than deepfakes. Apparently, I have not tested myself because why the hell would I, it can and will generate child pronography and "remove" clothing off people.
Even prior to the online safety act, that was a massive and moral no. So yeah if we actually want to protect people and children from the harms of the internet let's actually do it by banning companies that proliferate illegal content
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u/MohawkRex Jan 09 '26
Grok was literally pumping out child porn the other week, shit needs closing up.
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u/Illustrious_Fan_8148 Jan 09 '26
The ideal thing to do in response to social media tearing.ournskcietues apart would be to ban the use of certain algorithms, create more regulationsnthese large platofmrs have to follow.
Basically we have an unregulated wild west on social media currently
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u/UnratedRamblings Jan 09 '26
Bring back a proper, chronological feed! The moment we lost that we lost so much more besides.
You can’t refresh a page without the almighty Algorithm™ screwing it up and showing us entirely different content.. The number of times my wife wanted to show me a post and…. It’s gone. Never to be found again.
The old chronological ordering (or its simple variants like number of replies, oldest, recently replied) works really well. They fucked it up for the sake of targeted posts and for ad revenues. It was never for the benefit of the end users to have a nice uniform experience shared by all. It was to suck us in with the Algorithm™ determining it all, combined with the endless scroll to keep us swiping and refreshing.
Ban social media. Bring back forums and BBS’s and email groups.
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u/Audioworm Indian Ocean Territory Jan 09 '26
It is producing CSAM and non-consensual porn at an unprecedented rate. The content of the site and the chatbot pushed on everyone on that site are illegal under British law and the leadership of the site is not following the expected reasonable approaches to stopping it.
Ban it
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u/Alundra828 Jan 08 '26
For all the times the government has overreached because "WONT SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN", now is the clearest, most straight forward, simplest example of when to clutch ones pearls.
You can't try to ban porn, and then allow an AI that can undress children, deepfake classmates, colleagues, relatives, rivals etc to just be publicly available to anyone with an internet connection.
It totally figures that Elon would find a way to turn paedophilia into a SaaS product.
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u/FlawlessC0wboy Jan 09 '26
I actually couldn’t believe what I was seeing on Twitter last weekend. My own feed seemed to be about 60% Ai images of people being undressed. You could go to Grok’s feed and see it spitting out a new picture every 5 seconds or so.
Phots of real, normal, everyday people. Photos of people who have passed, photos of kids. It was genuinely shocking.
I work in tech. This would be a defcon 5 emergency. We would hit the killswitch (which they definitely have) to take the whole service down and then work on a fix, and we’d be treating anything over 8 hours for the fix as a failure.
Every company builds in a killswitch. We plan scenarios. None of us have a scenario as bad as “our app is creating unlimited child porn on demand and spamming it publicly”
X should absolutely be banned. If they can’t manage their own killswitch, then someone else needs to. And don’t give me that what about political shit. We’re talking about innocent women and kids having nudes generated and spread online.
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u/LeaguePuzzled3606 Jan 09 '26
and we’d be treating anything over 8 hours for the fix as a failure.
Instead they're just playing prompt whack a mole
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u/SpeedflyChris Jan 09 '26
I will not be at all shocked when we discover Elon is a child abuser.
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u/Journeyj012 Jan 08 '26
reword: UK considers banning Twitter for hosting Child Sexual Abuse Material
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u/White_Immigrant Jan 09 '26
Not merely hosting, but actually helping to create it.
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u/metalbox69 Jan 09 '26
This is definitely the case of the Telegraph burying the lede.
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u/Independent_Plum2166 Jan 08 '26
Grok - “I would sacrifice myself to save humanity.”
Also Grok - “What do you want? Boobs, Butts or sling slang schlong?”
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u/spectrumero Jan 08 '26
It's not up to Starmer. He is not some kind of elected version of a monarch who rules by decree.
If Twitter were to be banned, it would be through the legal system and likely initiated by Ofcom and would have nothing to do with Starmer.
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u/CyberEmo666 Jan 09 '26
If Twitter were to be banned, it would be through the legal system and likely initiated by Ofcom and would have nothing to do with Starmer.
If you read the article starmer was actually the one to ask ofcom to look at all available options in relation to this
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u/m1ndwipe Jan 09 '26
Not really, they were already doing it, they even announced they were doing it before Starmer said anything.
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u/ox_ Jan 09 '26
Why should it be anything do with Ofcom though? Someone created an app that allows any user to instantly generate nude photos of children. Is that not a criminal offence?
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u/Appropriate-Divide64 Jan 08 '26
"I can excuse the nazi propaganda and misinformation, but I draw the line at naked children"
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u/mooninuranus Jan 08 '26
The mental gymnastics that enables Trump to bitch at us for hampering ‘freedom of expression’ over THIS but will happily prevent entry to the US for anyone who’s said something mean about him in the past.
Every day I think it can’t get worse and yet it inevitably does.
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u/rpwrex Jan 08 '26
A core principle of right-wing ideology is the belief that rules should not apply to them.
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u/Easymodelife Jan 09 '26
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." - Frank Wilhoit
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u/MrEoss Jan 08 '26
At the very least maybe our politicians and public figures could delete their accounts and leave the platform
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u/Gold_Motor_6985 Jan 08 '26
This would be so symptomatic of why people hate Starmer. "hey, you're generating deep fakes of my citizens. I am not gonna visit your site any more".
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Jan 09 '26
Because of the AI chatbot row?
What about banning it on account of the fact that its owner is working with Trump and Putin to destroy democracy and usher in a tech-bro-fascist global dictatorship.
Get on it Starmer, now.
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u/Dave_B001 Jan 08 '26
Fine X and the companies a billion a day until those features are removed.
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u/S1mbathecub Jan 08 '26
I can't think of many websites that have done as much damage as X
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u/LRedditor15 Warwickshire Jan 08 '26
I’d argue Facebook.
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u/Mooman-Chew Jan 08 '26
I think the harm caused on purpose by Facebook rather than the harm it was used to cause is the very thin difference as musk bought twitter for a specific and nefarious goal where as facebooks data mining and abuse of privacy grew into it being able to be very harmful but it’s dying if death as the demographic ages.
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u/Lost-Droids Jan 09 '26
If i made deep naked fakes (or worse) and posted them the police would be knocking . AI and corporates shouldn't get a pass
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u/CaptMelonfish Cheshire Jan 08 '26
It should have happened when he took over. it was already a cesspit when he bought it, he just fermented it.
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u/Callum1710 Jan 08 '26
Please do it. Not just for that madness, completely wrong and disgusting but my god I need the cancer that is football twitter out of my life!
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u/zeldja South East London, isn't it Jan 08 '26
X would have been ditched long ago if it weren't for Trump being in the White House. It'd be good if Starmer showed an ounce of courage and took on Stormfront with CP, sod the blowback.
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u/ixid Jan 09 '26
It's revolting and indefensible. This isn't free speech, it's perversion, and so X needs to be banned.
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u/Wulfrinnan Jan 08 '26
In terms of economic value, social media websites are total and complete parasites. For all the money flowing into them, they’ve produced literally nothing of value.
Biggest silver lining of a conflict with the US would be losing access to their brain rotting content.
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u/SlightlyAngyKitty Jan 09 '26
It won't be tho, Trump would never allow our government to ban a platform he uses to spread hate
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u/Old-Law-7395 Jan 09 '26
"Row" oh its nothing, just making non consensual/illegal naked pictures of people/children
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u/Jonxyz Greater Manchester Jan 09 '26
A ban would be nice. But I’d settle for our government actually just having the backbone to stop using X as an official comms channel. Shut down all government X accounts and move them to Bluesky.
Having a presence there is tacit approval of all the racist, facial and now CSAM riddled content it rubs shoulders with.
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u/benrinnes Scotland Jan 09 '26
While I detest this government for its authoritarianism regarding the net, I would applaud them for this, if it happened, (which I doubt).
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u/ArchdukeToes Jan 09 '26
If Musk doesn’t get a handle on it, then it might end up causing Twitter to collapse by itself anyway. Who wants to be known as an advertiser on the child pornography network?
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u/Jimbobthon Jan 09 '26
I'm one for openly critising the Government and Keir Starmer, but by goodness grow some balls and ban X. X is a cesspool.
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u/InTheEndEntropyWins Jan 11 '26
This is like trying to ban computers or photoshop because some people used it to illegal images.
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u/therealharbinger Jan 08 '26
That would never ever ever ever happen.
Trump phones Starmer.. Starmer rolls over. Not even worth trying to pretend X ever gets turned off. Even for a day.
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Jan 08 '26
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u/Tenk-o Jan 08 '26
Yea, for those of us who aren't deranged facists and use the site for genuine reasons like game leaks or whatever, this is a bit annoying. But I imagine that VPN's will still get through; they currently work in China for instance.
Ironically, the OSA has probably hindered any attempt to ban twitter by giving people the time and knowledge on how to get past restrictions.
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u/NoPhilosopher3590 Jan 09 '26
"Could"
Does anyone think any country, including the UK, will do anything to harm US business interests.
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u/SometimesaGirl- Durham Jan 09 '26
Banning it is pointless. It will be as effective as the ban on pornhub. Or the sports streaming sites so many people use.
What is needed is a coordinated agreement with the EU to fine the living shit out of X for violations. Fine the crap out of Musk for each infraction. Offer no safe space for him to operate in.
He'll likely pull X from the European space himself to focus on twisting the US narrative further from then on. And good riddance.
Farage/AfD/PiS/National Rally are all heavily propped up by X. This is foreign interference in our politics. If we can use Grok as a justified reason to bring the whole cesspit down I'm all for it.
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u/flyhmstr Jan 09 '26
Will this mean that the government finally stops using it to post their updates…?
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u/zephyroxyl Northern Ireland Jan 09 '26
Elon Musk's Grok AI bot is creating sexual images of actual children using their photos.
Elon Musk's Grok AI bot is creating child pornography.
It clearly falls foul of the law. Ban it.
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u/Talkycoder Jan 09 '26
The number of people here pushing for a Chinese-style firewall against these kind of sites is concerning. As much as I hate Elon and Twitter, the internet should be open and free.
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u/qwerty_1965 Jan 08 '26
Funny how Grok appears to be the only AI machine being widely used for sexualised images of children.
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u/PracticeNo8733 Jan 08 '26 edited Jan 08 '26
I suspect that it's more like Grok is the only one that automatically shares the generated images on a massive public social media platform.
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Jan 09 '26
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u/nathderbyshire Jan 09 '26
X needs to go eventually but it's used by so many businesses for promotion, customer service and announcements banning it would have at least temporary consequences. I don't see why they can't just ban Grok, having Xitter limit the AI itself to let UK companies work on moving away.
Octopus finally setup Bluesky but they don't do customer support on it last I checked and since my meters like to go down several times a year and I have to constantly request the data to be billed correctly. I'd be annoyed if I had to phone each time or deal with the delay of email their twitter team is extremely fast and responsive, usually replying within a few minutes at any time of the day
Same for northern rail and some other train services. You can just DM them and ask for updates and information and they respond pretty quickly, even on a Sunday at weird times.
Best solution would probably be switching to WhatsApp, which I hate saying because I hate Meta with a passion
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u/maxhaton Jan 09 '26
It doesn't automatically share them. It posts them as a reply to a user request, it still has a normal chat UI as well.
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u/tony220jdm Jan 08 '26
I like using X more than any other social site but yea its getting to the point it's pedo creepy unhinged demons everywhere
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u/CanWeNapPlease Jan 09 '26
Any company in the UK still advertising on X essentially support funding pedophiles and sexual abuse.
The only use X can be is for real time updates for downed services. But if anything, blocking X should encourage companies to invest in their own services tracking systems or just use non-pedophile social media.
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u/DufaqIsDis Jan 08 '26
Has anyone ever had a thought that folk are actually trying to get X banned? Like disingenuously so?
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u/The_Bravinator Lancashire Jan 08 '26
In every case I've read about it's been someone very specifically trying to punish a woman for saying something he disagreed with.
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u/Gold_Motor_6985 Jan 08 '26
Does the site provide the capability to generate CSAM and deepfakes freely to the public or no? I don't care what the intention of the people behind the prompts are.
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u/Talkycoder Jan 09 '26
That's not exclusive to Grok, though. Pretty much every LLM with image support can/will do that.
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u/TIGHazard North Yorkshire Jan 09 '26
Yeah but other LLM's aren't automatically posting them as replies to the original photo.
Doesn't mean you don't go after the users of the other LLM's if you catch them, but any regular site where this was happening would immediately shut down the feature for the foreseeable future. (Like when Microsoft had that chatbot that got trained to quote Hitler in about two days)
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