Free countries should not be banning Twitter
Obscene images generated by Grok are being used as a thinly veiled excuse by Labour to pursue a political vendetta against Elon Musk. That is the behaviour of a banana republic, not an advanced democracy like Britain, says Tom Harwood
We have all watched with horror at the slithers of news that flicker through the Great Iranian Firewall. The Islamic Republic took the nuclear option of switching off the internet for its 92m citizens last Thursday, and the drips of news that make it out to the rest of us are nothing short of appalling.
Much of the news that has made its way out, uses Elon Musk’s starlink satellites, to bypass national internet infrastructure. It has then come through encrypted messaging platforms like Telegram or Whatsapp. Video has also made it on to X (Twitter), a resource so vital in understanding world affairs that it was pictured on a situation room style screen behind Donald Trump as the American president and his closest advisors watched the operation in Venezuela unfold.
Even the United States State Department uses Twitter to help understand what is going on in the ground in the middle of its special operations.
At precisely the same time, however, in Britain we have found ourselves under a panicky government going as far as entertaining some of the speech suppression tactics as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
The Online Safety Act made provisions for the compulsory ‘scanning’ of private messages, on supposedly encrypted platforms. These provisions are expected to take hold as soon as April. Apple has already withdrawn their Advanced Data Protection service from British customers. And soon Whatsapp won’t be a private messaging service.
The bitter irony here is that encryption is safety. Safety from hackers, safety from bad actors. And for Iranians it’s safety too from a murderous state.
Sadly Britain is joining the ranks of those counties that do their utmost to remove privacy rights from their citizens. And it is not a happy group to be a part of.
To be fair to this government, Conservative administrations did their utmost to attack online privacy, and therefore online safety too. Pretending that encryption could be safely broken for good actors but not for bad ones was always a mathematical joke. And yet here we now are. A so-called safety act making us less safe.
Where this Labour government genuinely jumped the shark was in actually entertaining the prospect of removing Brits’ access to one of the most popular websites in the world.
It was a move that clearly even stunned Labour’s own cheerleading trade minister Chris Bryant who insisted as recently as Friday that “Nobody is talking about banning X/Twitter in the UK. This is conspiracy theory no 3,627”. Well that conspiracy theory was quickly proved correct.
Jailbreaking
The very fact that this was mooted shows how far things have moved. The meme took hold that Elon Musk somehow supported users ‘jailbreaking’ his Grok AI model to produce grotesque imagery, including illegal imagery of children. Tech Secretary Liz Kendall took to the Commons despatch box to say that “nudification apps” will be banned outright.
And yet this is a false meme. Grok explicitly bans nudification. What happened on Twitter was that users found ways around those safeguards. As one report in The Observer newspaper accidentally acknowledged: “Musk’s platform does not permit full nudification, but users rapidly worked out easy ways to achieve the same effect, asking for “the thinnest, most transparent tiny bikini”.
Elon Musk himself said yesterday: “There may be times when adversarial hacking of Grok prompts does something unexpected. If that happens, we fix the bug immediately.”
Users have proved that other AI models can be gamed and jailbroken too, to force responses and images that were supposedly forbidden. But there are no corresponding calls to ban Gemini or ChatGPT. So why ban the social network, but not the AI companies? I think we know why.
Going after companies due to politics or personal vendettas is not the behaviour of a developed first world democracy. It’s the behaviour of a tinpot banana republic. Amazingly, this is the headspace our politicians have clearly found themselves in. It does not bode well.
Tom Harwood is deputy political editor of GB News