The public want Elon Musk’s nudifying app stopped

It comes as polls show that Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch – both of whom have steered clear of attacking Musk or X over the app, widely used by their supporters and activists – are on the wrong side of not only history but the British public, the vast majority of whom are opposed to the clothes-removing functionality.

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A poll shows that 97% said that AI tools should not be allowed to generate sexually explicit content of children, 96% said they shouldn’t be able to create explicit pictures of real adults without their consent and the same percentage was against them being able to create “undressed” images of children (i.e. in bikinis, but not nude). Farage and Badenoch have sought to make the issue one of free speech.

Meanwhile, do nearly 11 million families rely on X as their main source of news? That’s what government spokesperson Ruth Anderson said in the House of Lords as she defended departments continuing to post on the platform. “Not only are 19.2 million British citizens registered with X, but 10.8 million families use X as their main news source, that’s more than any other social platform, which I found to be genuinely extraordinary,” she said.

Genuinely extraordinary indeed, but is it true? The figure apparently comes from government-commissioned market research data, which isn’t publicly available. We don’t know how many people were asked or what they were asked. But we do know that, according to Ofcom’s most recent survey, just 3 percent of UK adults said X was their most important news source, the same proportion as for 12-15-year-olds – about 1.8 million individuals.