Why is the government still using X?

At a glance, Keir Starmer’s statement about cracking down on online child abuse looks strong. “We’re going to aim to make it impossible for children to take, share or view a nude image,” he wrote, “and we’re banning apps that create deepfakes.”

Unfortunately for the prime minister, that statement was posted just a few weeks ago on X, the social network that now hosts Grok, the AI that generates child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and nonconsensual deepfake porn of women on an industrial scale – doing so even as his government continues to use it, and hesitates to condemn it.

The government’s continued use of X is already indefensible, but one flimsy attempt at defence emerged in a Commons debate on Monday evening, during which a minister, Baroness Anderson, claimed at the dispatch box that “10.8 million families use X as their main news source”, adding “that is more than any other social platform, which I find genuinely extraordinary”.

The stat would indeed be extraordinary, because it’s nowhere close to being true. Ofcom found around 14% of Brits had used X to access news in the last month in its latest research, making it the 12th most accessed news source in the country – nowhere near the BBC, YouTube or Facebook, and only just ahead of Channel 4.

Somewhere, ministers and officials had confused “a” source of news with “main” source of news, further confused “people” with “families”. The resulting impression was entirely baseless – per research firm Ipsos, for every minute Brits spend on X, they spend 35 minutes on YouTube, 35 on Facebook, 11 on Instagram and seven on TikTok.

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The government’s insistence that it needs X to get its message out might make more sense if its content got any constructive engagement. The reality is quite different. Defra, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, has 173,000 followers on X, but the best of its last 10 posts got just 66 likes and 17,000 views, even using X’s inflated metrics.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, with one million followers, managed to do better, with 615 likes and 39,000 views for its Merry Christmas message. Replies to the post included “Is everything ok over there in the Islamic Republic of Britain?”, “Pedo Epstein defending”, and “You are complicit in genocide and you will be going to the Hague…merry Christmas”.

Attempts by Starmer or ministers to post on X, meanwhile, certainly attract engagement – almost all of it from the far right. Replies to David Lammy’s most recent post, on family courts on the Isle of Wight, include “We hate you. Your low IQ is too dangerous anywhere near the power you possess”, “Not importing the Third World would help significantly.”, “Useless c**t” and “Oi fatty f**k off socialist w***er”.

Still, Lammy may have had it better than his successor as foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper. After a video of her giving a statement to the Commons about Greenland on Monday, a paid blue tick user asked Grok to strip Cooper down to a bikini. Musk’s malevolent AI promptly complied, producing a realistic image of Cooper, still wearing her glasses and the same necklace, and still at the dispatch box, now in a skimpy bikini.

Evidently, this is the kind of public engagement the government regards as simply too important to pass up, even as the cost of posting alongside actual CSAM. Still, if this is what it thinks reaching out to voters looks like, maybe that helps explain its polling numbers?