UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is in talks with Canada and Australia in an effort to muster support for a potential international ban on social media X. It comes after the platform’s integrated AI assistant, Grok, was used to generate sexualised deepfakes of women and children.
Starmer is in talks with Australia and Canada, who share similar concerns over the deepfakes, in an attempt to coordinate a joint reponse to the growing scandal, the Telegraph reports.
Elon Musk’s platform has been the focus of controversy as Grok-generated porn deepfakes of women and children have spread rapidly on the platform. X said this was due to a lapse in its AI’s safeguards; it subsequently limited image generation to paying customers. But leading lawmakers were dissatisfied with the company’s response and are calling for a tough regulatory crackdown.
Canada’s minister for AI, Evan Solomon, wrote on X that “platforms and AI developers have a duty to prevent this harm”, though he also said that Ottawa is not considering a ban.
Australia’s prime minister Anthony Albanese deemed the Grok scandal “just completely abhorrent” and said it is another “example of social media not showing social responsibility.”
The UK media regulator Ofcom is looking into the matter, and sanctions could go as far as banning X in the country. Technology secretary Liz Kendall said the government would support Ofcom if it came to such a decision. Kendall’s comments fuelled Musk’s anger towards the UK government, which he accused of censorship.
In the meantime, the EU requested X to retain internal records of the chatbot for potential investigations.
European countries have been in a tough position vis-à-vis the US, that has repeatedly denounced the EU and the UK’s online content moderation rules as censorship against American companies.
However, the UK deputy prime minister David Lammy raised the issue with his US counterpart JD Vance, who agreed that Grok’s sexualised images are “entirely unacceptable”, Lammy told The Guardian.
Indonesia is the only country to have implemented a temporary ban on X.
(ow)