The Trump administration is trying to pressure the United Kingdom not to take action against Elon Musk’s social media platform in the wake of a scandal involving artificial intelligence-generated pornography.
A State Department official on Monday issued a vague warning to officials in the U.K. not to place any restrictions on Musk’s social media platform, X, after it unveiled a feature that allowed the platform’s AI chatbot, Grok, to generate nonconsensual pornography, including pornographic images of children.
In an interview with London-based GB News that aired Tuesday, State Department Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers said that “nothing is off the table when it comes to free speech,” framing the probe by the British media regulator, Ofcom, into nonconsensual pornography on X as some sort of infringement on democratic first principles.
“Let’s wait and see what Ofcom does,” Rogers said, “and we’ll see what America does in response.” She went on to suggest that X has “political valence that the British government is antagonistic to, doesn’t like, and that’s what’s really going on.”
But that’s not, in fact, what’s really going on. Generating pornographic images of unwitting individuals, including children, is not a political stance, and government efforts to rein in exploitative and abusive images hardly amounts to repression of political speech. This is, after all, an administration that should recognize the difference, having touted anti-deepfake and revenge porn legislation passed last spring.
Asked about the investigation by Reuters, X said that “it takes action against illegal content on the platform, including child sexual abuse material, by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary.”
Elsewhere, Indonesia and Malaysia became the first countries to ban Grok this past weekend. And the European Commission is investigating the matter as well.
One might think that the Trump administration, currently embroiled in a scandal over its unlawful withholding of documents related to deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, would want to do everything in its power to show it stands firmly against sexual exploitation, rather than seemingly to undermine efforts to fight it through vaguely worded threats.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.