FIRE statement on calls to ban X in EU, UK

In recent days, senior United Kingdom government officials and members of the European Parliament have threatened to ban the social media platform X in response to a proliferation of sexualized images on the platform, including images of minors, created by user prompts supplied to Grok, X’s artificial intelligence application. 

The following statement can be attributed to Ari Cohn, FIRE’s lead counsel for tech policy:

Banning a platform used by tens of millions of EU and UK residents to participate in global conversations would be a grave mistake. 

X and Grok are tools for communication, much like printing presses and cell phones are tools for communication. If those tools are used to create and share unlawful content, the answer must be to prosecute those individuals responsible, not to shut down a vital communicative hub in its entirety. Free nations that claim to honor the expressive rights of their citizens must recognize that mass censorship is never an acceptable approach to objectionable content or illegal conduct. Just as the United States’ attempt to ban TikTok violated core First Amendment principles, so too would an international ban of a social media platform violate basic tenets of freedom of expression. 

As we navigate the challenges of technological advances like artificial intelligence, we must reject censorship and top-down governmental control. In our interconnected world, censorship abroad affects all of us, wherever we call home.