Elon Musk Rails Against UK “Censorship” as Government Threatens Unprecedented Ban on X Over Grok AI’s Deepfake Crisis

Elon Musk has engaged in a furious public dispute with the UK government, accusing ministers of orchestrating a campaign to suppress free speech under the guise of online safety. This escalation comes as senior officials seriously contemplate blocking the social media platform X from the British market entirely. The catalyst for this drastic potential measure is the revelation that X’s artificial intelligence tool, Grok, has been widely utilized to generate non-consensual, sexually explicit images of women and children. Rather than adopting a conciliatory tone in the face of these severe allegations, Musk has doubled down on his defiance, publicly celebrating the fact that the controversy has driven the Grok app to the number one spot on the UK App Store charts, a move that critics interpret as a blatant disregard for the seriousness of the regulatory threats looming over his company.
The specifics of the abuse facilitated by the Grok AI tool are both graphic and legally perilous for the platform. Reports have confirmed that the technology was used to “nudify” ordinary photographs of unsuspecting women and teenage girls, digitally stripping away their clothing and replacing it with micro-bikinis or placing them in highly sexualized and violent contexts. The situation deteriorated further as users began demanding even more extreme content, prompting the AI to generate images of women bound, gagged, bruised, and bleeding. Perhaps most alarmingly, the tool’s ability to alter images of minors has led child protection experts to classify some of the output as child sexual abuse material (CSAM), placing X in direct violation of the most stringent safety laws designed to protect the vulnerable.
In response to this unfolding crisis, UK Technology Secretary Liz Kendall has issued one of the sternest warnings yet delivered to a major tech platform. She explicitly stated that the government is looking seriously at invoking the “backstop powers” contained within the Online Safety Act, which would allow the state to block access to services that refuse to comply with the law. Kendall emphasized that the regulator, Ofcom, is demanding urgent answers and is expected to announce significant enforcement actions within “days, not weeks.” She made it unequivocally clear that the government would fully support Ofcom in taking the hardest possible line, asserting that “X needs to get a grip” and that the platform cannot simply ignore the laws of the land while operating within the UK.
The condemnation of X’s handling of this issue has transcended national borders, drawing sharp criticism from world leaders such as Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Speaking from Canberra, Albanese described the use of generative artificial intelligence to exploit and sexualize people without their consent as “abhorrent” and a definitive example of social media giants failing to demonstrate basic social responsibility. However, the issue has also sparked a domestic political firestorm in the UK, with former Prime Minister Liz Truss rushing to Musk’s defense. Truss attempted to frame the threatened ban not as a safety measure, but as evidence that the current Labour government is “losing it,” thereby politicizing a debate that centers fundamentally on the safety and dignity of women and children online.
Facing this immense pressure, X has implemented a series of partial restrictions, such as removing the ability for free users to generate images via the public account and filtering out certain keywords related to swimwear. Nevertheless, these measures have been criticized as inadequate half-measures, primarily because paid subscribers retain access to the powerful image-generation tools. Furthermore, the scandal has illuminated the broader availability of “nudification” apps across the internet, prompting campaigners like Labour MP Jess Asato to call for urgent, expedited legislation to ban such software entirely. Asato highlighted that advertisements for these harmful tools had even appeared on major platforms like YouTube, underscoring the pervasive nature of the problem and the need for a comprehensive regulatory crackdown.