Letter to the Prime Minister: the Government's use of X

Today, backed by other civil society organisations and campaigners, we've written to the Prime Minister to call on him to end the use of X for Government communications in light of the appalling generation of sexualised images of women and girls via the platform's Grok chatbot.

You can read the full text of the letter below.

Dear Prime Minister

THE GOVERNMENT’S USE OF X

On Monday, the Government Whip, Baroness Anderson, told the House of Lords that - despite the creation, at scale, of sexualised images of women and children by the X chatbot, Grok - “the Government will continue to post organic content on X”. She went on to justify this position by telling the Lords that “I still believe that X is an appropriate platform to use because I believe in freedom of speech and freedom of expression”.

On Wednesday, IWF reported that they had identified three instances of category C child sexual abuse material (CSAM), which appear to have been generated by Grok Imagine, and Bloomberg estimated that the tool was now generating thousands of undressed images per hour. Women in public life are being targeted by Grok users, prompting the chatbot to generate sequences of sexualised, dehumanising images. Researchers have found Grok prompts adjacent to posts by UK Government Ministers. Your own Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology has called the developments “appalling”.

The signatories to this letter - spanning interests across civil society and academia - call on you now to treat this with the urgency it deserves. This is not about freedom of speech. X is facilitating criminal activity, silencing women and profiting from it. Despite the international uproar and the representations by regulators, the platform shows no sign of withdrawing, or even modifying, the functionality that allows this.

The Government has a target to halve violence against women and girls in a decade. Just before Christmas, you personally promised that the long-delayed Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy “begins a whole-of-government, whole-of-society effort. It is the first step in a truly national endeavour that prioritises prevention, tackling the root causes of this violence, while relentlessly pursuing its perpetrators and supporting its victims and survivors.”

If you are to remain true to your word, there is no justification for your Government to continue to use X as a platform for Departmental communications. The Government’s presence on X effectively props it up and gives many other organisations no choice but to remain there too; using alternative platforms for syndicated Government comms would reduce this need.

To remain on X betrays the thousands of women who have been demeaned in recent days on it, and many more who now live in fear that they may be next.

This letter is copied to the Rt Hon Darren Jones MP, Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister in the Cabinet Office.

Yours sincerely

Maeve Walsh, Director, Online Safety Act Network

Dr. Elinor Carmi, City St. George’s, University of London.

Dr Elly Hanson, Strategic Director, CEASE

Reset Tech

Adele Zeynep Walton, online safety campaigner

Jo Lindsay Walton, Sustainable AI Futures

Andrea Simon, Executive Director, End Violence Against Women Coalition

Professor Olga Jurasz, Director, Centre for Protecting Women Online

Jonathan Baggaley, PSHE Association

Tara Steele, Director, The Safe AI for Children Alliance

Nicki Watts, AI Youth

Hannah Stevens, CEO, Elect Her

Gemma Sherrington, CEO, Refuge