The UK’s War on X and Free Speech |
Free speech is dying in much of Europe and in the so-called free world. The United Kingdom recently announced its intentions to fine or even ban X, the social media platform, over deepfakes, a sign that things may get worse before they get better.
Fox News reported on Monday that U.K. “ministers confirmed a possible ban on Elon Musk’s social media platform X amid a widening probe and with the company potentially incurring hefty fines.”
This move, according to Fox News, “follows the launch of a formal investigation by Ofcom, the U.K. communications regulator, into whether X breached its legal duties under the U.K.’s Online Safety Act and came after reports that the platform’s built-in AI chatbot, Grok, was used to generate and share sexualized deepfake images of women and children.”
The U.K.’s Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said in the House of Commons Monday that the move against X and its “Grok” AI “is not, as some would claim, about restricting freedom of speech” and that a potential ban is all just about “upholding basic British values of decency and respect, and ensuring that the standards that we expect offline are upheld online.”
Sorry, that’s a little tough to believe.
The Wall Street Journal criticized the U.K.’s move against X in a recent editorial. While the Grok feature to “create AI smut is gross,” the Journal noted, that “ … doesn’t mean British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is right to pick this fight, which smacks of selective censorship.”
Musk insists that Grok prevents inappropriate underage images and that the only exception is the “adversarial hacking of Grok,” which would be fixed immediately.
I not aware of any naked........