The government is being urged to quit X over the digital undressing of women by its AI tool Grok (Alamy)
4 min read
The government should not quit X as doing so would leave a “vacuum” for its political rivals to fill, Keir Starmer’s former communications director has said.
There are growing calls for Downing Street and Whitehall departments to stop posting on the social media site, formerly known as Twitter, amid outrage over its built-in AI tool, Grok, being used to create non-consensual indecent images of women and child sexual abuse imagery.
The Prime Minister has warned X that the government will “take action on this”.
On Thursday, Labour MP Louise Haigh, the former transport secretary, called on the government and her party to quit X, posting on the website that it would be “unconscionable” to use it “for another minute”.
Writing later for The House, she said: “[Elon] Musk’s Twitter has no interest in cleaning up its act. It works actively to undermine our democratically elected government and is, as we speak, causing harm to children.”
A number of Labour MPs had been calling on the government to quit the platform before the Grok scandal.
Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, Sarah Owen, recently told PoliticsHome that the website “promotes state-run bots, racists, antisemites, islamophobes, homophobes, misogynists” and “very rarely removes disinformation, threatening or harmful material”.
However, James Lyons, who left his previous role as Downing Street director of strategic communications in September, said it would be wrong for the government to quit X. Speaking on this week’s episode of PoliticsHome podcast The Rundown, he said the website remained “an important battleground for ideas”.
Lyons, who worked for TikTok before joining Starmer’s government in late 2024, said that “calls from Labour MPs to boycott different platforms or media are not new”, adding: “There are a number of reasons why the government are right to keep it under review, but not to leap in and come off here.
“I take the view that your job in political communication is to persuade people, and to persuade people, you have to engage, and I think you should be using all the platforms and forums that you can to do that.
“And you don’t want to leave a vacuum.”
He admitted that the government is “not going to sway very many people on there because maybe people have already got a fixed view”, but argued that it is still “important to contest the space”.
He also revealed that during his time in Downing Street, “X was very much moving down the priority list for the government” in favour of Reddit and other forms of social media.
Lyons played a key role in the Labour government’s move towards new forms of media during his time in No 10. As revealed by PoliticsHome at the time, the government joined Reddit during his tenure. Since then, Starmer has joined TikTok and Substack, and there has been growing collaboration with influencers across Whitehall. The government says the moves are part of its bid to make sure it is active where people increasingly get information.
On Thursday, the PM described the way Grok was being used as “disgraceful”, and called on X “to get a grip of this”, warning that he had “asked for all options to be on the table”.
Speaking to Greatest Hits Radio, Starmer said: “It’s disgusting. And X need to get their act together and get this material down. And we will take action on this because it’s simply not tolerable.”
On Tuesday, Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said the Grok situation was “absolutely appalling”, adding “we cannot and will not allow the proliferation of these degrading images”.
The UK’s communications watchdog, Ofcom, said earlier this week that it had urgently contacted X to establish whether it should investigate the website using online safety legislation.
The Rundown is presented by Alain Tolhurst, and is produced by Nick Hilton and edited by Ewan Cameron for Podot
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