Keir Starmer has signaled he is prepared to back regulatory action that could ultimately result in X being blocked in the UK.
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has suggested, more or less, that because Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok has been generating images of women and minors in bikinis, he’ll support going as far as hitting the kill switch and blocking access to the entire platform.
“The situation is disgraceful and disgusting,” Starmer said on Greatest Hits Radio; the station best known for playing ABBA and now, apparently, for frontline authoritarian tech policy announcements.
“X has got to get a grip of this, and Ofcom has our full support to take action…I’ve asked for all options to be on the table.”
“All options,” for those who don’t speak fluent Whitehall euphemism, now apparently includes turning Britain’s digital infrastructure into a sort of beige North Korea, where a bunch of government bureaucrats, armed with nothing but Online Safety Act censorship law and the panic of a 90s tabloid, get to decide which speech the public is allowed to see.
Now, you might be wondering: Surely he’s bluffing? Oh no. According to Downing Street sources, they’re quite serious.
And they’ve even named the mechanism: the Online Safety Act; that cheery little piece of legislation that sounds like it’s going to help grandmothers avoid email scams, but actually gives Ofcom the power to block platforms, fine them into oblivion, or ban them entirely if they don’t comply with government censorship orders.
Killing X isn’t a new idea. You may remember Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff, founded the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. In 2024, leaks revealed that the group was trying to “Kill Musk’s Twitter.”
Hellbound and Down 