- X marks the spot again - 17th February 2026
- Wordy again part three - 16th February 2026
- ‘Lies, damned lies etc…’ - 13th February 2026
Shock news that the regulator has launched a formal investigation, and that a new law is being introduced, after the AI tool of ‘X’, Grok, was used to create sexualised imagery of women and children, highlight our decision NOT to use the social media site for The Eye’s stories as it (and its right wing owner Elon Musk) is so controversial.
Last month Sir Keir Starmer threatened to “control” Grok if Mr Musk’s social media platform continues to make them, because these actions were “absolutely disgusting and shameful”.
“If X cannot control Grok, we will – and we’ll do it fast because if you profit from harm and abuse, you lose the right to self regulate”, he told a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP).
The Prime Minister (PM) may have had these words in mind when he announced a crackdown on digital platforms generally.
The UK Government is giving parents and carers greater clarity and support to make the online world safer for children. Speaking to parents and young people yesterday, the PM made clear officials were to act at pace to keep kids safe online, in a digital world that is shaped by powerful platforms, addictive design and fast-moving technologies. There was to be a clamp down on vile illegal content created by AI, forcing all AI chatbot providers to abide by illegal content duties in the Online Safety Act.
Meanwhile the media watchdog Ofcom has said it contacted X directly, and set a firm deadline to “explain what steps it has taken to comply with its duties to protect its users in the UK”.
The deadline was met, but even so Ofcom carried out an “expedited assessment of available evidence…”, and it seems that X’s actions may have been insufficient for the regulator, as it has proclaimed that a formal investigation will look into whether X has “failed to comply with its legal obligations under the Online Safety Act”.
On the back of all this, the Technology Secretary Liz Kendall has told the House of Commons (HoC) that a new law would make it illegal for companies to supply the tools designed to create sexualised images of children.
But X has made the headlines for the wrong reasons before this. The former Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Linda Yaccarino, left the firm (although she had stuck it out for two years!), when Grok apparently praised Hitler.
Screenshots published on social media in the Summer showed the Chatbot saying that Hitler would be the best person to respond to ‘anti-white hate’, but Mr Musk wrote on X that Grok was “Too eager to please and be manipulated, essentially…”.
Yet the Ofcom investigation, and new law, are just the latest of mounting problems for Mr Musk, along with his explosive fallout with Donald Trump.
His car brand Tesla faces the loss of billions of dollars in US Government subsidies, after the president cut state support for green industries.
Revenue from state subsidies accounted for at least 38 per cent of Tesla’s profits of $7.1 billion in 2024 as the company banked $2.8 billion from trading “regulatory credits”, a state-level subsidy paid to encourage production of Electric Vehicles (EV).
The Nazi mishap had emerged the previous day to Ms Yaccarino’s resignation, when users reported that Grok had made the contentious comments declaring that the best person to address anti-white hatred would be “Adolf Hitler, no question. He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time.”. In another post, Grok wrote that “If calling out radicals cheering dead kids makes me ‘literally Hitler,’ then pass the mustache”.
But X is no stranger to difficulties, when its ad revenue fell by more than half in one year, and afterwards Mr Musk told its biggest advertisers to “go fuck yourself”.
Meanwhile Jamie Lee Curtis, The Guardian, and even Clifton Suspension Bridge have joined swathes of people deserting X.
Sky reported this desertion beneath the headline: “The X exodus – could Bluesky spike spark end of Elon Musk’s social media platform?”.
‘Bluesky’ refers to a site run by the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey that has a stronger focus on moderation. According to the official Bluesky account, a million people joined the platform in just one day, after Mr Musk was given a position in Donald Trump’s government.
He was to become co-leader of the US “Department of Government Efficiency”, and declared that federal spending could be cut by $2 trillion, or about a third. He left in high dudgeon.
When Mr Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, he cut roughly 80 per cent of the company’s workforce, and it has faced a series of challenges since then. Figures have shown that at one point the monthly US ad revenue at X had declined at least 55 per cent year-on-year each month since he bought it. The company has struggled to retain some advertisers since the takeover, and Ms Yaccarino, had to meet bank lenders who helped finance Mr Musk’s acquisition to outline the company’s business plans.
In The Times, writer Janice Turner declared: “Elon Musk sits astride Twitter/X as the living embodiment of all that is screwed up and vile about his site…so now the question for users is why stay?”.
Mr Musk has also been in hot water after proclaiming during riots in the UK that “civil war is inevitable”.
Mr Musk’s inflammatory announcement showed him with a video in Liverpool, but a spokesperson for Sir Keir Starmer said the violence came from a small minority of people who “do not speak for Britain”, and the Prime Minister did not share the sentiments of the billionaire, who has been criticised for allowing far-right figures back on to his social media platform.
The spokesperson added: “There’s no justification for comments like that. What we’ve seen in this country is organised, violent thuggery that has no place, either on our streets or online”.
Mr Musk also shared a video of a person purportedly being arrested for offensive comments online, asking: “Is this Britain or the Soviet Union?”, and replied to a post criticising UK policing, suggesting the police’s response “does seem one-sided“.
He shared, too, a fake Daily Telegraph article claiming Sir Keir was considering sending far-right rioters to “emergency detainment camps” in the Falklands. Mr Musk deleted his post after about 30 minutes but a screenshot captured by Politics.co.uk suggests it had garnered nearly two million views before it was deleted.
In it, he shared an image posted by the co-leader of the far-right group Britain First, Ashlea Simon, which she captioned with, “we’re all being deported to the Falklands”. The fake piece, purportedly written by a senior news reporter for the Daily Telegraph and mocked up in the newspaper’s style, said camps in the Falklands “would be used to detain prisoners from the ongoing riots as the British prison system is already at capacity”.
Yet Mr Musk’s remarks and endorsements have not simply been opposed by the UK Government. The head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), Stephen Parkinson, said that his interventions over the riots were: “deeply unhelpful”.
Mr Musk seems to have unlikely backers too. For instance the extreme right wing activist Tommy Robinson appears to be a supporter of his.
Mr Robinson served four prison terms between 2005 and 2019, and in 2021 was found to have libelled a 15-year-old refugee at a school in Huddersfield. He was ordered to pay £100,000 plus legal costs, but after breaching an injunction about repeating the libel, Mr Robinson was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
A post by Mr Musk included a Family Guy meme featuring its main character in the electric chair, alongside the words: “In 2030 for making a Facebook comment that the UK government didn’t like”. Mr Robinson reposted it with the comment: “If it wasn’t for Elon Musk. The government and legacy media would’ve had me hung, drawn and quartered, without reply, over their failings”.
The present details about the Ofcom inquiry, shines the spotlight on previous information about Mr Musk. He has been described by his daughter as a ‘cruel and absent father’, and major firms boycotted his social media site after allegedly anti-Semitic remarks.
Mr Musk had supposedly agreed with a post on X that falsely claimed Jewish or other people were stoking hatred against white people.
He said that the user who referenced the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory was speaking “the actual truth”. The conspiracy theory holds that Jews or others are engineering the ethnic and cultural replacement of white populations that will lead to a “white genocide”. It has also been spouted during the riots, with Jews replaced by Muslims.
Major firms including Disney, Warner Bros and Sky News’ parent company Comcast pulled their advertising, and Lions Gate Entertainment as well as Paramount Global also said they were pausing advertising. It was reported that Apple was pulling ads too. IBM also halted its advertising on X after a report by Media Matters (MM), the US media watchdog, found that its ads were placed next to pro neo-Nazi content.
Mr Musk has always possessed a well-known propensity to turn to the law to resolve questions. Indeed it has been revealed that a not-for-profit organisation was forced to close, because it was presented with a lawsuit from Mr Musk.
It was claimed on X that the advertising group Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), illegally conspired to boycott advertising on his platform, but the statement had huge ramifications.
“GARM is a small, not-for-profit initiative, and recent allegations that unfortunately misconstrue its purpose and activities have caused a distraction and significantly drained its resources and finances”, the group said in a statement, adding: “GARM therefore is making the difficult decision to discontinue its activities”.
It has also emerged that Mr Musk has sued MM alleging it manufactured the report showing advertisers’ posts alongside neo-Nazi content. In a lawsuit filed in the US District Court in Texas, it was claimed that MM “knowingly and maliciously” portrayed ads next to hateful material “as if they were what typical X users experience on the platform”.
The extraordinary comments in The Times, the accusation of anti-Semitism, and now the regulator’s investigation, put Mr Musk’s headline-grabbing views in context, but he has always denied that he is against Jews. He has, for instance, proclaimed: “To be super clear: I am pro free speech, but against anti-Semitism of any kind“.
However to Mr Musk’s critics this is pure humbug because he has described George Soros (a survivor of the Holocaust, and a frequent victim of anti-Semitic attacks), as ‘reminding him of Magneto’ (a Marvel comic villain who is also a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust).
Mr Musk has also engaged in a very public spat with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which is a high-profile organisation opposing anti-Semitism and racism. He has threatened the ADL with legal action, blaming it for a collapse in advertising revenue, when it could, in fact, be to do with the nervousness of companies associating with him.
With this background, the action taken by The Eye not to post stories on X, has been endorsed by an inquiry into why its Chatbot was used to create sexualised images of women and children...
The memories of our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry’s decades long award-winning career in journalism (when news about the questioning of the future of well-known organisations was always reported) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disease Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
