The United States warned it may take sweeping action against the United Kingdom if the country follows through on threats to ban Elon Musk’s X.
A State Department official said on Tuesday that the move would constitute an attack on free speech.
“Nothing is off the table” regarding the U.S.’s response to U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer should he institute the ban, Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers told GB News. Prohibiting U.K. officials from traveling to the U.S. is among the options the State Department is considering, according to the Telegraph.
The debate centers on the British government’s concerns that X is failing to comply with the Online Safety Act by not having sufficient safeguards in place prohibiting users from utilizing its Grok AI chatbot to create sexually explicit images or fake pornographic content, including of children. X recently restricted Grok’s AI image generation feature, making it available only to paying subscribers. Other technology companies, such as OpenAI, are allowing users to generate sexually explicit images, or “erotica,” on their platforms.
Free speech advocates are slamming the investigation from Ofcom, the U.K.’s online safety watchdog, as the country’s latest attempt to police online content. England is home to some of the most aggressive speech laws in the West, including the 2023 Online Safety Act, the Public Order Act 1986, and Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which criminalizes online posts that intentionally “cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another.”
Former U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss and Musk have been among the loudest critics of the country’s laws governing speech, arguing they constitute censorship, “shutting down media, shutting down elections, or shutting people out of the political process.”
“The U.K. has become a police state,” Musk said in November 2024, in response to news that a Briton was arrested after livestreaming a protest.
The British government has pushed back against concerns its latest action against X is unnecessary censorship, as Technology Secretary Liz Kendall warned on Monday that Ofcom is being given new powers to impose financial penalties of up to 10% of X’s worldwide revenue, or possibly seek a court order to block X from functioning in the U.K. Kendall said she would make creating the images a priority offense under the Online Safety Act.
“This is not, as some would claim, about restricting freedom of speech, which is something that I and the whole Government hold very dear,” she told the House of Commons. “It is about tackling violence against women and girls. It is about upholding basic British values of decency and respect, and ensuring that the standards that we expect offline are upheld online. It is about exercising our sovereign power and responsibility to uphold the laws of this land.”
“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,” Starmer told Labour lawmakers the same day.
Rogers rebutted those arguments on Tuesday, suggesting that officials have been inconsistent in their approach to targeting X for a possible ban, overlooking other social media companies where users can generate similar images by using undressing tools.
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“What the British Government wants is the ability to curate a public square to suppress political viewpoints it dislikes,” she said. “And that is why it’s targeted X for a potential ban, even though other AI widgets afford similar capabilities. X has a political valence that the British Government is antagonistic to and doesn’t like, and that’s what’s really going on here.”
Earlier this month, Malaysia and Indonesia became the first countries to block Grok over concerns about sexualized images.
