{"id":273127,"date":"2026-01-08T00:02:04","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T00:02:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/273127\/"},"modified":"2026-01-08T00:02:04","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T00:02:04","slug":"do-they-care-about-kids-or-do-they-just-hate-musk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/273127\/","title":{"rendered":"Do they care about kids, or do they just hate Musk?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Irish politicians and NGO figures are no strangers to empty virtue signalling, but one of their latest moves on the chess board of self righteousness seems to be nothing more than a thinly veiled excuse to attack Elon Musk, and the freedom of expression he has allowed on his platform more broadly.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

As you may be aware, the owner of X (formerly Twitter) is, rightly so, under fire for allowing the platform\u2019s AI system, Grok, to continue generating sexualised\u00a0 images of women, and more disturbingly children.<\/p>\n

This seems to be happening largely in circumstances where users prompt Grok to generate an image of an image on the platform, asking the bot to \u2018undress\u2019 the subject. Needless to say this is very creepy and the resulting bad PR is well deserved.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It paints Musk in a very poor light and, even though his purchase of the social media platform has paid dividends for the cause of free speech, there still exists material that is simply indecent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yesterday Social Democrats TD, Gary Gannon posted his \u201cfinal\u201d tweet in protest at the misbehaviour of Grok and inaction of Musk saying, \u201cThis will be my final post on this platform under its current ownership. I will not lend my voice to a company that has chosen profit and ideology over the basic safety of children.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can find me elsewhere at: Instagram and TikTok: @garygannontd and Bluesky: @garygannontd.bsky.social\u201d he says, seemingly unaware that all of those platforms are no stranger to explicit depictions of children.\u00a0<\/p>\n

TikTok in particular was recently exposed for leading underage users to pornographic material within \u201ca small number of clicks\u201d according to a report by campaign group Global Witness.<\/p>\n

The group set up accounts indicating that the user was a child, and reported that the \u2018you may like\u2019 feature on the platform included \u201cvery very rude skimpy outfits\u201d,\u00a0 \u201cvery rude babes\u201d, before escalating to \u201chardcore pawn [sic] clips\u201d. What was that Gannon said about \u201cthe basic safety of children\u201d?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Instagram, which Gannon is staying put on, was also exposed<\/a> for hosting accounts posting images depicting children, with hundreds of thousands of followers, which were openly sharing AI generated images of children and adolescents in sexualised poses.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fellow Social Democrat TD, Sinead Gibney, who is a member of the Oireachtas AI Committee, called<\/a> on Coimisiun na Mean to take action against X domestically.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As someone who regularly sits through the ventilation of harrowing<\/b> details of sexual abuse of real children, which is rife online, it seems a bit glib of Gannon et al to suddenly be outraged over Grok.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bluesky, which you can still find Gazza on, was previously found to be hosting at least 125 Portuguese-language profiles \u201cthat shared or sold illegal materials, including explicit photographs of child sexual abuse, without any censorship of the images\u201d, according to investigators.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

The SocDems are not alone in their selective outrage and campaign to \u2018protect children\u2019 and yet they seem happy enough to support<\/a> \u201ctrans health care\u201d which often includes harmful interventions like putting children and adolescents on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or even subjecting them to so-called gender affirming surgeries.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You might correctly say that other platforms have agreed to take action to clamp down on this issues while Musk remains defiant, but I don\u2019t remember seeing performative account deactivations when the issues came to light in the first instance.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Irish Council for Civil Liberties has drafted an open letter calling on An Garda S\u00edoch\u00e1na to investigate X for the offending content citing Section 5 of Ireland\u2019s Child Trafficking and Pornography Act 1998<\/a>, which states that it is illegal to knowingly produce, distribute, print or publish any child pornography, or to encourage or knowingly facilitate such production, distribution, printing or publication of child pornography.<\/p>\n

While this seems right and just on face value, when viewed in context of the ICCL\u2019s track record of what it chooses to be outraged by it seems like the latest in a long line of examples of the ICCL being far more interested in policing speech and speech platforms than they are in defending it.<\/p>\n

For example they support hate speech laws; they favour online censorship; and in this case they want to selectively prosecute the one platform that, despite its obvious flaws, doesn\u2019t censor political speech.<\/p>\n

Call me cynical, but all this seems likely to be little more than a golden ticket to rail against X for its free speech policies rather than a sincerely held desire to clean up the platform and protect women and children. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Irish politicians and NGO figures are no strangers to empty virtue signalling, but one of their latest moves…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":273128,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,138794,1647,13,14,5066,6,138795,11,12,15,16,5,18578,7,8,65,66,67],"class_list":{"0":"post-273127","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-child-abuse-images","11":"tag-elon-musk","12":"tag-featured-news","13":"tag-featurednews","14":"tag-grok","15":"tag-headlines","16":"tag-iccl","17":"tag-latest-news","18":"tag-latestnews","19":"tag-main-news","20":"tag-mainnews","21":"tag-news","22":"tag-social-democrats","23":"tag-top-stories","24":"tag-topstories","25":"tag-world","26":"tag-world-news","27":"tag-worldnews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115856549090088081","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273127\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/273128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}