> The organizations, which focus on child safety, women’s rights and privacy, expressed their concerns in letters on Wednesday to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, claiming that Grok’s content violates the technology companies’ policies.
I find it repulsive that "company policies" should dictate what I'm allowed to install on my phone, and just as repulsive that these organizations try to subvert user choice, lobbying some random corporation to get it to extra-legally impose its will on people. If they had any integrity, they would be directing their persuasion at users themselves, instead of giving their blessing for corporations to act as morality police.
And of course, despite promptly fixing the issues, the call is not "we are grateful X decided to fix it, we'll keep a close eye on it so keep up the good work or else", but "ban them even though they did what we wanted". Because the issue was just a pretext.
> They'll hit 16 and be given full access to the entire range of platforms, and they'll overdo it and binge on it, with all the harms that happen because of that.
"Full access" meaning deanonymized, with a hostile government watching over their shoulders to control online sentiment:
First, we are told, the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act. - https://archive.md/2025.08.13-190800/https://www.thetimes.co...
For the confused reader, "CSAM-as-a-service" means they will ban your account and sic the cops on you if you use their service to create CSAM:
“We take action against illegal content on X, including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary,” X Safety said. “Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”
The trick here is that the sexualised but not actually naked pictures of children are not actually illegal in the US (or quite possibly England as well). Just very disturbing.
It's an odd shadow war though, because the government haven't even pulled their own Twitter accounts from the service (which they can and should do).
And so can you run local models which can generate far worse material.
And horny teens have always fantasist about celebrities, or that girl they have a crush one etc. And there always had been people people cutting physical images together to place the head of their obsession on some erotic magazine sourced body.
But like you saied it's creating a feed of all the people which have been sexualized against their will.
There is a huge difference between someone doing something in your mind (or room) and it staying there and it being posted international for billions of people to see (and download, and re-post, and cherry pick preferred pictures and then feed into AI model which will actually full undress people etc.)
and a huge company making money from not just sexualizing people against their will, but also putting creating a public feed about all the people they have sexualized against their will
and then the owner going out of their way to claim that that is all free speech they won't change anything and anyone who tries is fascist, communist, evil etc.
except that definitions of what free speech means vary largely between countries and huge parts of the world have definitions where stuff like "creating sexualized images of people against their will" (or systematic harassment, cyber mobbing, death threads, and a bunch of other things) are very clearly _not_ covered by free speech.
realistically speaking this is also AI output, i.e. not speech of a person (weather natural or legal/company), i.e. it's questionably if Grok posting generated images does even count as speech (in the US and many other countries)...
Such content includes anything using the word cisgender, posting pictures of Herr Musk from before their gender reaffirmment surgery, and referring to the Grand Pedophile in Chief in a non-brownnosing manner, I presume.
Do the actually do this, or do they just say they do this?
If they do it, why don’t they preemptively block it instead? I know they don’t have anywhere near the manpower to find this stuff manually so it would have to be automated. If it’s automated then they could detect it as it’s happening and prevent it from being made in the first place.
> Do the actually do this, or do they just say they do this?
they do it within limits
- you trick it into generating actual naked people (instead of bikini pictures or sexualized poses etc.)
- it blows up (bad press, a lot of abuse reports)
which means effectively for most of this pictures there are no consequences
heck Elon has personally argued they fall under free speech and nothing need to be changed.... (but in EU, UK, and large parts of the world they don't. Also in a round about way free speech probably doesn't apply to it in the US either: because speech needs a speaker which is a person (natural or legal) and AI doesn't count as a person (and hence can by itself not hold copyright either)).
and Musk went further saying it's free speech and implying if you try do anything against it you are fascist
and you could check the Grok "~feed" and get tons over tons of examples of them _not_ doing anything. And if that changed, then it did very recently. I mean the UK is not the only country where the topic of regulating X to to them failing to self regulate and outright intentionally ignoring local laws was opened up. And as much as Musk might say he don't care and it's implied that the US will retaliate against any country which enforces actions against X for not complying with their law when doing business in their country, it still is a huge headache for X (company) and it's not like people in the US are supper happy about that either.
I don't know, I got the rules of free speech absolutism from the worlds free speech absolutist.
If I were to say "a free speech loophole for things they believe in / don't believe doesn't sound compatible with absolutism" in I would be using a) banned speech as they define it and b) violating their free speech.
> They are already shooting people in the face and not even putting up a pretense of acting shocked at the act.
Are you talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Justine_Damond? Yes her killer got off with a slap on the wrist, but even in 2017 when that happened it was nothing new - there have been plenty of unjustified or dubious police killings before and since [1], so I'm confused by that "already" in your sentence - nothing has changed, has it?
When Ivor Caplin, the former Labour MP that, among other things, attacked Musk for talking about Pakistani rape gangs, was arrested for pedophilia [1], this is the article they published - no photo, no name, no party affiliation, and no followup article - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg45y4r0yngo
BBC omits identity of Nigerian murderer from article about how he killed his wife [2,3], making it entirely about "gendered violence" instead. Readers can't make the incorrect inference if you simply withhold information from them.
BBC omits all criticism of Starmer from their reporting on his meeting with Trump [4].
When Farage's private bank account was closed due to his politics, the BBC first simply took the bank's word that this was entirely due to financial considerations. When Farage obtained internal documents of that bank, explicitly saying he met financial criteria for an account, but it was closed despite this due to his politics, the BBC issued a correction article trying to imply his politics were merely "also" considered [5].
BBC uses all-white stock photos to warn about obnoxiously loud phone use on trains [6].
But makes sure to use a racially-diverse cast for the 1066 Battle of Hastings [7].
This is not the only such instance, nor a coincidence, by their own admission: Moffat even talks about the idea he mentions above — the excuse of “historical accuracy” that some people often give to justify an all-white cast — “[W]e’ve kind of got to tell a lie: we’ll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn’t have been, and we won’t dwell on that. We’ll say, ‘To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we’ll summon it forth.’” [8,9]
[5] "On 4 July, the BBC reported Mr Farage no longer met the financial requirements for Coutts, citing a source familiar with the matter. The former UKIP leader later obtained a Coutts report which indicated his political views were also considered." - https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-66288464
I've no idea what Dr. Who, murder-reporting, period dramas or stock photography choices have to do with the Labour party, but I'll pretend you're arguing in good faith and address what I believe to be the point in your copypasta.
The most empirical and robust study regarding bias was performed by Cardiff University in 2013. Its major finding regarded the dominance of Conservative party political sources in BBC coverage; in coverage of immigration, the EU and religion, they accounted for 49.4% of all source appearances in 2007 and 54.8% in 2012.
The data also showed that the Conservative Party received significantly more airtime than the Labour Party. In 2012, Conservative leader and then Prime Minister David Cameron outnumbered Labour leader Ed Miliband in appearances by a factor of nearly four to one (53 to 15), and governing Conservative cabinet members and ministers outnumbered their Labour counterparts by more than four to one (67 to 15).
In reporting of the EU the dominance was even more pronounced with party political sources accounting for 65% of source appearances in 2007 and 79.2% in 2012.
In strand two (reporting of all topics) Conservative politicians were featured more than 50% more often than Labour ones (24 vs 15) across the two time periods on the BBC News at Six
This is evident right up to the 2019 election - BBC Question Time editing out audience laughter at Prime Minister Boris Johnson's fumbling responses, and soft-shoeing his ascendancy by excusing him from the tender mercies of Andrew Neil - unlike his opposition.
Wait a news channel gave more air time to the current prime minister and his cabinet, the guy and team with the power, than someone else. Consider me shocked!
Have you considered that by choosing different time periods you get different results.
Maybe the BBC bends the knee to whoever is calling the shots, that's what it looks like to me.
Cardiff University is extremely unlikely to be neutral, and a study done more than a decade ago tells us little about the state of the BBC today.
The OP gave many examples but you only need to know one: the BBC broadcast fake footage of Trump created by splicing together different parts of a speech he gave. The parts were separated by more than 50 minutes and they hid the splice by cutting to the crowd. This manipulation of the public only came to light because an internal whistleblower tried to report what happened, then discovered the BBC institutionally supported this kind of video manipulation so blowing the whistle internally was useless. He reported it to the Telegraph instead.
In other words:
• The BBC broadcasts fake news clips.
• It does so deliberately, with the full approval of its board.
• They refused to apologize or clean house.
• They probably do it a lot and get away with it.
That's it. That's the only thing you need to know about the BBC's political bias.
And it's not just them. Channel 4 News broadcast an entirely fake video of Farage during the last election. It framed him by using an actor who was collaborating with an undercover film crew (and the actor was acting at the time). This was proven beyond all doubt and C4 refused to do anything about it. Once again, institutional fraud in service of election manipulation.
There's no real gap between using actors or mid-sentence splices and using AI, special effects or other standard Hollywood tactics. So the idea that British TV news is biased in favour of the right is farcical on its face. Let us know when they're regularly faking videos of Starmer! I grew up in Britain and the state of Britain's institutions is just shameful. It's tin pot third world stuff. British people need to understand that their state owned TV channels are completely unreliable sources to learn about the world from.
I literally cited the BBC Question Time editing out audience laughter at Prime Minister Boris Johnson's fumbling responses, and the incredible partisanship to protect him from Andrew Neill while then setting up the most controversial UK political interview of the 21st Century with Marr
I have to also laugh at Channel 4 (decidedly not the BBC in the first instance) putting some small thumb on the scales of justice re: Nigel Farage and the Reform party generally - the biggest political and institutional frauds outside of the Reese-Moggs clan.
My favourite prominent example: footage originally taken from GB News was used by a local Reform Party to falsely claim a rival MP was abusive to Nigel Farage in Parliament
> Nothing happening in the federal governemnt or the middle east or eastern Europe affects me from a local standpoint
The federal government decides the limits within which your local government must operate. A good chunk of your taxes go to wars in the middle east, and a good deal of the politicians in that federal government self-professedly care more about a middle-eastern country than the one they were elected to represent [1].
To rephrase a saying - you may not care about federal politics, but federal politics cares about you.
[1] "if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain would be our commitment to our aid, I don’t even call it our aid, our cooperation with Israel." - Nancy Pelosi, Israel-American Council Conference, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1LmnQRnw8I
Some context? What exactly happened with his son, and I assume he elaborated on what those two options mean, or what specifically they were in his case?
Don't buy into that framing either. Optional scanning - if a user wants to, they are free to download government spyware onto their phone/computer and do all the scanning they want, local or otherwise. No new laws needed.
I agree. If someone is happy for a government worker/algorithm to snoop through everything they send to anyone, feel free to opt in, just don't force us to participate.
If you use app A and that app is scanned for "malicious" content then I will message you on app B where there is no such scanning. If you don't want to use app B then I guess we can't be friends.
I mean at some point you need to make some choices.
But the beauty is that if anyone wants to talk through app A exclusively and their contacts are happy to respond on the same platform, then they can do that.
parents should have government issued tools for safeguarding their children's devices.
it's insane that we have so many standards and guidance for how to keep children safe.
but when it comes to the internet, it's either a wild west with no restrictions, or huge government overreach that negatively impacts the adult community.
We already have alternatives, this legislation is taking them away. If I want heavily censored discourse, I can go to reddit. If I want the wild west, I can go to 4chan. If I want privacy, I can use signal. And lots of services on different parts of that spectrum, or where different things are allowed.
But the UK government wants to eliminate that choice and decide for me. And most importantly, they don't want to call it censorship, but "safety". To keep women and girls "safe" (but nobody is allowed to opt out, even if they're not a woman or girl, or don't want this "safety")
I find it repulsive that "company policies" should dictate what I'm allowed to install on my phone, and just as repulsive that these organizations try to subvert user choice, lobbying some random corporation to get it to extra-legally impose its will on people. If they had any integrity, they would be directing their persuasion at users themselves, instead of giving their blessing for corporations to act as morality police.
And of course, despite promptly fixing the issues, the call is not "we are grateful X decided to fix it, we'll keep a close eye on it so keep up the good work or else", but "ban them even though they did what we wanted". Because the issue was just a pretext.
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