Do anyone other than right wing nuts even use X anymore? I cancelled my account years ago (shortly after Musk bought it) and never looked back. With Blue Sky available, plus intelligent forums like The Bulwark, where is the need? Everything posted on X that occasionally pops up on my feed is hateful garbage or just plain lies. X needs to go the way of 4 Chan. Yes, Media Matters SHOULD be able to post on X if it wants to, but it’s abundantly clear now that X needs to just go away.
Twitter is not an enterprise, it is merely a privately owned speech and media regulator. Private interests have no right to abuse their power to regulate either our speech or our media. Twitter and xAI should be nationalized without compensation and delivered to patriotic and loyal managers not captured by treasonous sectional interests.
Billionaire and career Bond-villain cosplayer Elon Musk has been forced by public backlash into a humiliating backdown over use of his AI chatbot, Grok. Watching the world’s richest man eat a shit sandwich on a global stage represents a rare win for sovereign democracy.
Because – unlike his company history of labour and safety abuses … his exploding rockets … his government interventions that deny aid to the starving … disabling Starlink internet systems in war zones … sharing “white solidarity” statements … or growing concern about overvaluations of his company’s share price – the nature of Grok’s latest scandal may finally be inspiring governments towards imposing some Musk-limiting red lines.
Scully, I want to believe.
In its signature tone of “insufferable jerk who’s just completed his first online webinar on how to patronise girls”, Musk’s chatbot appeared this week to make the world less safe, less fair and perhaps even as unpleasant as a fascist-styled, ketamine-addled rich-kid dipshit in cheese hat dancing while the world burns, if one could imagine such an awful thing.
Grok’s latest notoriety isn’t because it’s shared false information – though it has, previously, downplayed the Holocaust due to a claimed “programming error” and, more recently, spread conspiracy-style claims about the Bondi massacre.
It’s not because of Grok’s antisemitic comments, or random claims of “white genocide” within unrelated conversations.
It isn’t about the fallibility of AI chatbots more broadly, either – even though consumer advocates, health professionals, media associations and perhaps everyone who’s ever taught at a university ever have repeatedly warned chatbot “advice” is recklessly unreliable.
If you’re asking what behaviours could’ve possibly been left to condemn in the wake of Grok once accepting the name “MechaHitler”, I envy your naivety – because the answer is: Grok released tools enabling the creation and sharing of nonconsensual sexual exploitation images.
Grok’s “spicy mode” capacity launched in August, and by December its host platform X was “deluged with images of women and children whose clothes (were) digitally removed”. Last week, researchers in Paris reported finding 800 pornographic images created by Grok’s tools, including depictions of sexual violence. A UK-based internet-monitoring group reported users of a dark web forum boasting about Grok creating “sexualised and topless imagery of girls aged between 11 and 13”.
Formerly confined to the internet’s darker corners, “nudifying” deepfake tools have been used for the image-based abuse of children and adults from Bacchus Marsh, Australia to Almendralejo, Spain, creating content so “vomit-inducing” a bipartisan US Congress prohibited it in the Take it Down Act last year. Yet Grok placed tools with similar functionality within reach of any aspirational sex offender with X access. Public complaints metastasised over new year while the platform generated up to 7,751 sexualised images per hour.
The alternative is give in, give up … and accept reality in the image of the Grok that Musk built
Across Australia, the US, the UK, EU states, and many others, it’s not just the consumers of child sexual abuse material and nonconsensual image-based abuse who are criminalised. It’s also the makers. It’s the publishers. It’s the hosts.
Musk’s response? First, he posted laugh-cry emojis at “bikinified” images, then his company claimed it had somehow restricted the service just by paywalling their generation. Condemned as insufficient, Musk subsequently published a statement saying that using Grok to make “illegal content” would draw equivalent punishment to uploading it – ignoring Grok’s facilitation role. When Britain joined other countries – notably Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia and Brazil – accelerating investigations into X’s compliance with local laws, Musk cried censorship … and shared deepfaked images of Keir Starmer, tits out, in bikini.
As scrutiny intensified this week, he ultimately declared he was not aware of any “naked underage images” being generated on the platform. Now, the tool’s been removed.
Note, 15 civil society, internet and child safety groups wrote to xAI last August, warning “a torrent of obviously nonconsensual deepfakes” was “entirely predictable”.
The definition of addiction is the compulsive repetition of harmful behaviour. My name’s Van Badham, and I’m hooked on hopium, jonesing for any sign there’s a democratic government left on earth now inspired to go full Gandalf against the Balrog and slap Musk down.
X/Grok hosted image-based abuse, its owner was contemptuous of our sovereignty. It wasn’t its first scandal, it won’t be its last: responsible governments should simply ban it.
We all know why they haven’t: Musk uses his influence to wade into electoral contests of countries he doesn’t even live in. His $44bn purchase, X, operates as a personal propaganda fountain, platforming his preferred flavours of far-right crap at such strength and volume that Stockholm-syndromed Twitter remnants mistake it for public opinion. It’s not, but self-recruited digital stormtroopers mobilise from its public permission structures into acts of unforgivable cruelty. Images of Renee Good’s dead body was being digitally altered by Grok within days of her being killed by an ICE agent.
There was a time when leaders sought government to influence history, not to roll over supine to unelectable dweebs they would have rightfully avoided at high school. US SecDef Pete Hegseth’s incomprehensible announcement this week that – yes – Musk’s very same Grok will be the AI integrated into the Pentagon’s military systems guarantees an IT lesson in “garbage in, garbage out” on an epic historical scale; but the political timeliness of global outrage and horror towards X/Grok’s cumulation of reckless behaviours may be everyone else’s best chance to escape it.
The alternative is give in, give up … and accept reality in the image of the Grok that Musk built: ugly as a cybertruck, unfunny as a sink – and as powerless as a child stripped naked by adults while other adults stand around them doing nothing.
I gave X a chance to be a disinterested platform after Musk bought Twitter. That trial lasted less than 6 months, during which I blocked Musk's account from sending posts to me. I then watched as it became more and more vile; I finally had had enough and dropped it altogether. I'm much happier :-)
The whole purpose of TOS is to give that company a license to get away with everything. Who actually reads all of it? We basically forfeit any legal recourse. They all get us to agree to litigate through arbitration which is usually in their interest to avoid liability. Disturbed by your phone always listening to you? Too bad you checked the box. We've invited the vampires inside, so good luck America.
Although I didn't read all 250 comments here, no one seems to be asking Andrew to please explain why he is still on X and how he rationalizes staying.* I followed the link to his account and he only has 21.7K followers. That's not meant as an insult, but The Bulwark YouTube channel has 1.58 million subscribers and over 878 million views. That works out to Andrew having 0.0137% of the number of X followers as The Bulwark YouTube channel has subscribers. It also seems likely that, if Andrew and all of The Bulwark people on X announced they were migrating to a different platform, many of their followers would follow them there.
Andrew, please explain to us why you remain on X. Maybe you could also include your colleagues' reasons for staying as well. If you do a video, at least 1.58 million people would have the opportunity to see it.
(I am assuming he's not a fan of X's owner given his description, "one crabby, strung-out, impetuous billionaire, whose devotion to the ideals of free and open communication tends to shrivel up quickly when it comes into tension with his various political campaigns, ideological beliefs, or personal vendettas," but please correct me if I'm wrong.)
Because unlike us they are reporters. They have to be on X to report what they see with their own eyes. They don't have the luxury of reporting on what they heard like Bari does lol. I have the luxury of cancelling subscriptions. They don't. And whether we like it or not there is news that does occur on X.
I don't pretend to know what Andrew is thinking which is why I asked him to please explain. Maybe he's got a reason I, nor any of the commenters, haven't thought of and I'm open to being convinced.
Reporting on others might be part of the reason, but it doesn't explain why he would ask people to follow him on X. You need an account to follow someone so Andrew asking people to follow him is encouraging them to keep or get an X account. More users encourages advertisers putting money into the pocket of the "one crabby, strung-out, impetuous billionaire." You don't need to have followers to have an account so Andrew has no need to keep or increase his number of followers if his sole reason for having the account is to track and report on others.
I made a comment to the same effect. Basically I said that if this nominally Anti Trump crew had any ethics they would abandon the sewer social media platform of Trump's greatest enabler.
My bet is that they won't. How weak-willed is that? They don't walk Anti Trump like they talk Anti Trump.
I question your observation about them as someone who has been here since the beginning. Nuanced observation is not a betrayal of anti-trump. Nor does having guests we don't like.
Elon Musk is a combo - the jilted spouse, the bitter x employee, the relative still mad that you sliced the turkey before they arrived, etc. He’s easily triggered, off balance and carries a big checkbook. Very dangerous combo for all of us mere mortals who work for a living and don’t have a tantrum every time someone is nasty to us.
Do anyone other than right wing nuts even use X anymore? I cancelled my account years ago (shortly after Musk bought it) and never looked back. With Blue Sky available, plus intelligent forums like The Bulwark, where is the need? Everything posted on X that occasionally pops up on my feed is hateful garbage or just plain lies. X needs to go the way of 4 Chan. Yes, Media Matters SHOULD be able to post on X if it wants to, but it’s abundantly clear now that X needs to just go away.
Elon Musk was ,is and will continue to be an example of why we should tax the shit out of these fucks.
That's about three years too late. But at least they seem to be catching up.
Never had a Xitter acct, and now I'm even happier about it.
Media Matters should have done this as soon as Musk bought Twitter.
Twitter is not an enterprise, it is merely a privately owned speech and media regulator. Private interests have no right to abuse their power to regulate either our speech or our media. Twitter and xAI should be nationalized without compensation and delivered to patriotic and loyal managers not captured by treasonous sectional interests.
The "Full disclosure" footnote at the end made me lol. :)
This, from Australia's Van Badham, says it all about Elon Musk and his chatbot baby, Yuk, sorry Grok:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/15/elon-musk-grok-backflip-blocked-x-ai-sexualised-images-backlash
Billionaire and career Bond-villain cosplayer Elon Musk has been forced by public backlash into a humiliating backdown over use of his AI chatbot, Grok. Watching the world’s richest man eat a shit sandwich on a global stage represents a rare win for sovereign democracy.
Because – unlike his company history of labour and safety abuses … his exploding rockets … his government interventions that deny aid to the starving … disabling Starlink internet systems in war zones … sharing “white solidarity” statements … or growing concern about overvaluations of his company’s share price – the nature of Grok’s latest scandal may finally be inspiring governments towards imposing some Musk-limiting red lines.
Scully, I want to believe.
In its signature tone of “insufferable jerk who’s just completed his first online webinar on how to patronise girls”, Musk’s chatbot appeared this week to make the world less safe, less fair and perhaps even as unpleasant as a fascist-styled, ketamine-addled rich-kid dipshit in cheese hat dancing while the world burns, if one could imagine such an awful thing.
Grok’s latest notoriety isn’t because it’s shared false information – though it has, previously, downplayed the Holocaust due to a claimed “programming error” and, more recently, spread conspiracy-style claims about the Bondi massacre.
It’s not because of Grok’s antisemitic comments, or random claims of “white genocide” within unrelated conversations.
It isn’t about the fallibility of AI chatbots more broadly, either – even though consumer advocates, health professionals, media associations and perhaps everyone who’s ever taught at a university ever have repeatedly warned chatbot “advice” is recklessly unreliable.
If you’re asking what behaviours could’ve possibly been left to condemn in the wake of Grok once accepting the name “MechaHitler”, I envy your naivety – because the answer is: Grok released tools enabling the creation and sharing of nonconsensual sexual exploitation images.
Grok’s “spicy mode” capacity launched in August, and by December its host platform X was “deluged with images of women and children whose clothes (were) digitally removed”. Last week, researchers in Paris reported finding 800 pornographic images created by Grok’s tools, including depictions of sexual violence. A UK-based internet-monitoring group reported users of a dark web forum boasting about Grok creating “sexualised and topless imagery of girls aged between 11 and 13”.
Formerly confined to the internet’s darker corners, “nudifying” deepfake tools have been used for the image-based abuse of children and adults from Bacchus Marsh, Australia to Almendralejo, Spain, creating content so “vomit-inducing” a bipartisan US Congress prohibited it in the Take it Down Act last year. Yet Grok placed tools with similar functionality within reach of any aspirational sex offender with X access. Public complaints metastasised over new year while the platform generated up to 7,751 sexualised images per hour.
The alternative is give in, give up … and accept reality in the image of the Grok that Musk built
Across Australia, the US, the UK, EU states, and many others, it’s not just the consumers of child sexual abuse material and nonconsensual image-based abuse who are criminalised. It’s also the makers. It’s the publishers. It’s the hosts.
Musk’s response? First, he posted laugh-cry emojis at “bikinified” images, then his company claimed it had somehow restricted the service just by paywalling their generation. Condemned as insufficient, Musk subsequently published a statement saying that using Grok to make “illegal content” would draw equivalent punishment to uploading it – ignoring Grok’s facilitation role. When Britain joined other countries – notably Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia and Brazil – accelerating investigations into X’s compliance with local laws, Musk cried censorship … and shared deepfaked images of Keir Starmer, tits out, in bikini.
As scrutiny intensified this week, he ultimately declared he was not aware of any “naked underage images” being generated on the platform. Now, the tool’s been removed.
Note, 15 civil society, internet and child safety groups wrote to xAI last August, warning “a torrent of obviously nonconsensual deepfakes” was “entirely predictable”.
The definition of addiction is the compulsive repetition of harmful behaviour. My name’s Van Badham, and I’m hooked on hopium, jonesing for any sign there’s a democratic government left on earth now inspired to go full Gandalf against the Balrog and slap Musk down.
X/Grok hosted image-based abuse, its owner was contemptuous of our sovereignty. It wasn’t its first scandal, it won’t be its last: responsible governments should simply ban it.
We all know why they haven’t: Musk uses his influence to wade into electoral contests of countries he doesn’t even live in. His $44bn purchase, X, operates as a personal propaganda fountain, platforming his preferred flavours of far-right crap at such strength and volume that Stockholm-syndromed Twitter remnants mistake it for public opinion. It’s not, but self-recruited digital stormtroopers mobilise from its public permission structures into acts of unforgivable cruelty. Images of Renee Good’s dead body was being digitally altered by Grok within days of her being killed by an ICE agent.
There was a time when leaders sought government to influence history, not to roll over supine to unelectable dweebs they would have rightfully avoided at high school. US SecDef Pete Hegseth’s incomprehensible announcement this week that – yes – Musk’s very same Grok will be the AI integrated into the Pentagon’s military systems guarantees an IT lesson in “garbage in, garbage out” on an epic historical scale; but the political timeliness of global outrage and horror towards X/Grok’s cumulation of reckless behaviours may be everyone else’s best chance to escape it.
The alternative is give in, give up … and accept reality in the image of the Grok that Musk built: ugly as a cybertruck, unfunny as a sink – and as powerless as a child stripped naked by adults while other adults stand around them doing nothing.
It's the American legal system: money wins. The lawyers involved charge at least $600 an hour, often much more.
Take them to small claims court for $7000 a thousand times.
I gave X a chance to be a disinterested platform after Musk bought Twitter. That trial lasted less than 6 months, during which I blocked Musk's account from sending posts to me. I then watched as it became more and more vile; I finally had had enough and dropped it altogether. I'm much happier :-)
The whole purpose of TOS is to give that company a license to get away with everything. Who actually reads all of it? We basically forfeit any legal recourse. They all get us to agree to litigate through arbitration which is usually in their interest to avoid liability. Disturbed by your phone always listening to you? Too bad you checked the box. We've invited the vampires inside, so good luck America.
Although I didn't read all 250 comments here, no one seems to be asking Andrew to please explain why he is still on X and how he rationalizes staying.* I followed the link to his account and he only has 21.7K followers. That's not meant as an insult, but The Bulwark YouTube channel has 1.58 million subscribers and over 878 million views. That works out to Andrew having 0.0137% of the number of X followers as The Bulwark YouTube channel has subscribers. It also seems likely that, if Andrew and all of The Bulwark people on X announced they were migrating to a different platform, many of their followers would follow them there.
Andrew, please explain to us why you remain on X. Maybe you could also include your colleagues' reasons for staying as well. If you do a video, at least 1.58 million people would have the opportunity to see it.
https://vidiq.com/youtube-stats/channel/UCG4Hp1KbGw4e02N7FpPXDgQ/
(I am assuming he's not a fan of X's owner given his description, "one crabby, strung-out, impetuous billionaire, whose devotion to the ideals of free and open communication tends to shrivel up quickly when it comes into tension with his various political campaigns, ideological beliefs, or personal vendettas," but please correct me if I'm wrong.)
Because unlike us they are reporters. They have to be on X to report what they see with their own eyes. They don't have the luxury of reporting on what they heard like Bari does lol. I have the luxury of cancelling subscriptions. They don't. And whether we like it or not there is news that does occur on X.
I don't pretend to know what Andrew is thinking which is why I asked him to please explain. Maybe he's got a reason I, nor any of the commenters, haven't thought of and I'm open to being convinced.
Reporting on others might be part of the reason, but it doesn't explain why he would ask people to follow him on X. You need an account to follow someone so Andrew asking people to follow him is encouraging them to keep or get an X account. More users encourages advertisers putting money into the pocket of the "one crabby, strung-out, impetuous billionaire." You don't need to have followers to have an account so Andrew has no need to keep or increase his number of followers if his sole reason for having the account is to track and report on others.
point taken.
I made a comment to the same effect. Basically I said that if this nominally Anti Trump crew had any ethics they would abandon the sewer social media platform of Trump's greatest enabler.
My bet is that they won't. How weak-willed is that? They don't walk Anti Trump like they talk Anti Trump.
I question your observation about them as someone who has been here since the beginning. Nuanced observation is not a betrayal of anti-trump. Nor does having guests we don't like.
I don't want to tell any of them what to do, I want to ask them their reasons for staying on X while criticizing it and Musk.
Elon Musk is a combo - the jilted spouse, the bitter x employee, the relative still mad that you sliced the turkey before they arrived, etc. He’s easily triggered, off balance and carries a big checkbook. Very dangerous combo for all of us mere mortals who work for a living and don’t have a tantrum every time someone is nasty to us.
https://open.substack.com/pub/popularinformation/p/these-companies-are-advertising-on?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=3jjrzi
everyone should get off Xitter. including Andrew
Musk is scum