Keir Starmer has been urged to pull his government off Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, after a former cabinet minister dubbed the platform ‘unconscionable’.
Labour MP Louise Haigh, former transport secretary, has warned that her party and the government should entirely quit the site.
This pressure comes in the wake of this week’s reports that users were able to prompt X’s built in chatbot, Grok, to generate explicit images and children.
Since the news came out earlier this week, internet safety groups have confirmed that various forms of this material meet the threshold for illegal content.
Haigh posted online that she had not personally used Musk’s platform for quite some time, calling it “already an unpleasant place”, even before the controversial tech entrepreneur took the helm.
She added that the social media app had since become “utterly unusable” after hate speech and abuse accelerated on the platform.
She said: “However, the revelations around the enablement, if not encouragement, of child sexual abuse mean it is unconscionable to use the site for another minute”.
The former minister has urged Labour to communicate with the public where they can participate online in a safe way, and where they can be protected from, in her own words, “such illegality”.
Her words land as the Internet Watch Foundation revealed that criminal photos of kids aged 11 to 13 were allegedly generated by X’s AI bot, and subsequently shared on the dark web.
Most alarmingly, the group said users were “boasting” about how quickly the chatbot could produce such material.
Mounting pressure on the public sector
These findings have tightened the grip on government department’s reliance on channels like X as a primary communications platform.
Just yesterday, The parliamentary Equalities Committee confirmed it had stopped using it altogether, claiming X was no longer appropriate given the risks.
Elsewhere, cabinet office minister Nick Thomas-Symonds received pressure from committee chair Sarah Owen, who addressed him directly, saying his stated mission to tackle violence against women and girls stood at odds with the government’s use of X.
The prime minister’s official spokesperson described the allegations around generated explicit images as “completely unacceptable”.
“X needs to deal with this urgently”, he said, adding that Ofcom has the government’s backing to investigate and enforce the recently passed Online Safety Act.
When asked whether the government would quit the platform entirely, the spokesman said: “All options are on the table.”