Staying on X is an Endorsement - and It's Unforgivable

The UK government cannot claim to protect women and children while continuing to post on a platform that enables their abuse.

Towards the end of September last year, I made the decision to, in as many words, tell X to go fuck itself. I had come to the point in which the general environment of X, which had up to that point already been a pretty toxic place already, had become completely untenable.

Logging Off the Sewer

I kept my account open for reasons of not wanting @BearlyPolitics as a username to be pilfered by some far-right wankstain and have been exclusively only posting links to my articles on this site. It was, without a doubt, the best decision that I have made.

In the time since my departure, things got worse.

A platform that cannot safeguard women and children cannot be treated as a public square - Photo by EMRE YILMAZ on Unsplash

Much, much worse, culminating in the events over the past few weeks in which Musk’s robot has allowed people to start creating non-consensual sexualised images of women and children directly on the platform, at scale, in public reply threads, with almost no meaningful friction or safeguards in place. What was once a cesspit became something far more dangerous: an industrialised abuse machine with a billionaire owner who alternates between indifference and outright mockery when confronted with the consequences.

The nudification of women and girls taking place wholesale on X since December isn’t the fringe exploit that was discovered by bad actors on the dark web, this was a feature that was baked straight into the platforms infrastructure.

Tag a photo. Ask the Robot to undress it. Watch it comply. Scroll past dozens of replies containing AI generated sexualised images of real women, real girls, real people - all produced with zero consent and brazenly broadcast to anyone unlucky enough to be on that timeline that day. The victims include minors, public figures, ordinary users - and the platform just… let it happen.

That, right there? That should have been the line. That should have been the uncrossable point in which the UK government, a government under both the Tories and Labour, that has been telling us for years just how terribly seriously it takes online safety and violence against women and girls, should have finally shown it actually means it. It should have been this event that lead Keir Starmer to say:

“Enough is enough - we simply cannot justify our presence on a platform that is so overtly violent to women and girls. It goes against everything this government stands for, and no amount of online presence justification can justify our remaining presence.”

We did not get that.

I will be fair and say we got very strong words. “Absolutely appalling” and “utterly unacceptable” were both thrown into the ring by Liz Kendall. Keir Starmer intoned that it was “absolutely disgusting.” OfCom told us that they were in “urgent contact” with X. A minister told us that “all options are on the table”, and then… well, nothing, really.

No departure. No ultimatum. No true, meaningful consequence to a platform that has been letting users create non-consensual pornography of women and girls within this country, including people like Bella Wallerstein¹, and many others with smaller profiles who are far less able to push back.

There was just the slow, now all too familiar whirr of institutional cowardice and spinelessness that we have come to know over the past two years.

Now, in the incredibly slim chance that a Labour MP or government minister is reading this², I feel that something must be made crystal clear here:

Remaining on X is not a neutral act of any kind. It is neither pragmatic nor is it some sort of clever, hard-nosed comms strategy³. It is an endorsement. A tacit, but unmistakable one, of a platform which has shown long before this that it simply cannot be trusted with even the most basic safeguarding responsibilities. A platform that has for years championed violent misogynists like the Tate brothers with zero pushback. A platform in which women, on a daily basis, get flooded with the most vile abuse imaginable, and now one which when confronted with a scourge of mass generation of non-consensual sexual imagery of children did not ringfence access, but instead shrugged its shoulders yet again and vaguely spoke about “addressing issues.⁴”

The government knows all of this. It knows about the issue of violence, misogyny and abuse aimed towards women - Jess Phillips was right at the centre of it just last year. It knows exactly how toxic and reprehensible a platform X has become.

The harm caused to the people involved in this scandal is not theoretical - it’s real. The Online Safety Act, a central pillar of this government’s strategy to address violence against women and girls, explicitly criminalises image abuse, including AI-generated material for precisely this reason.

The position for the government is completely untenable.

It cannot say on one side that the creation of sexualised images of minors is incompatible with a “decent society” while still posting governmental announcements on the exact platform that enabled it. It cannot posture about protecting women and children online while remaining institutionally embedded in an ecosystem that has actively promoted harm against these groups through their own in action, and which has now tipped into further harm in the most grotesque way possible.

OfCom, as already mentioned, is urgently investigating. Great. To what end? The regulator has shown time and time again that it has no teeth and that there is yet to be a sense of urgency in anything that it does. Investigation also, for those that do not know, is not actual enforcement. They can “investigate” all they want, but while they are doing so, real harm is still happening. And when it comes to enforcement, is that even going to have an impact?

The EU fined X €120 million in 2025 for deceptive design of the blue tick system, a lack of transparency in its advertising repository and for a failure to provide data access to research. Did anything improve? Nope. Not one bit. Because fines do not deter a man who has the emotional intelligence of an aggrieved fourteen year old whose entire business model rests entirely on provocation, grievance and platforming what are the worst people on the internet.

Elon Musk has never responded to regulation - only leverage, and the UK government seems to have voluntarily given up the only leverage it could actually use: withdrawal.

We are told by the government that leaving would be “difficult” - it would require “coordination” and that ministers cannot simply walk away from the “public square.”

These excuses are weapons-grade bullshit, because X ceased being a public square when it started replatforming people like Andrew Tate, Nicholas Fuentes, Katie Hopkins and the worst, most divisive personalities on the internet. The public square was set on fire the moment that X reduced moderation teams to basic non-existence, and let people rip.

X is a privately owned platform that is controlled by a single individual who himself is deeply embedded in the US government and far-right politics, and who has not only demonstrated active hostility to regulation, accountability and democratic norms, but to the United Kingdom as a country itself with his calls for civil war and the toppling of our government.

A minister said that “We will not be bullied out of a public space. It is up to Elon Musk to make sure this is a platform where everyone can feel welcome”, which, I am sorry, is the worst defence possible for the continued presence on X. Not only does this framing nonsense, it inadvertently shows that the government firmly believes that power in this case rests directly with none other than Musk himself.

Staying is in no way or form resisting bullying - staying is accepting the terms of participation set by a billionaire tech-bro who has repeatedly and belligerently shown that he does not give the tiniest iota of a shit about harm unless it personally inconveniences him.

The only conclusion I can reasonably come to is that the government is scared. It’s terrified of losing narrative control. Scared of being the first mover. Scared of the far-right. Scared of Musk.

So it hides. Behind OfCom. Behind Process. Behind the flimsy idea that something might eventually happen if everyone is just very patient and very polite.

Meanwhile, victims are created. Victims wait.

I did not wait. I fully deactivated my X account this week. Forty-seven thousand followers, gone. Years of work, gone. Approximately 15% of an income stream from referrals - an income stream I will be very dependent on in the coming months - gone.

I have done this because I had to admit that the calculation was becoming increasingly simple. Either my name is attached to a platform that harms women and girls, or it’s not. I am personally not willing to have my name sitting - even dormant and purely used for automated distribution - anywhere near a platform that has become a factory for sexualised abuse and overseen by a man who treats the fallout as nothing more than a culture war inconvenience.

If I, as an individual writer, can make that decision, the UK government has absolutely no excuse whatsoever for failing to do so - and that failure of action is sending a message. A message that values are negotiable, harm is tolerable and the convenience of a posting first strategy outweighs the dignity and safety of people being abused in plain sight.

The Labour government’s continued presence on X is unforgivable. It is time for them to take a stand. It is time for them to do better. We, as a country, deserve better.

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1. Yes, I know exactly who Bella Wallersteiner is, and yes, even though I disagree with nearly ever single thing she says, there is still no excuse ever for any woman to be treated in this way.

2. Exceedingly slim, I know.

3. A comms strategy that I will add has been woeful even with the use of X.

4. While doing the final line edit for this piece news came through that X would be limiting image creation to paid subscribers. This does nothing to address the core harm. Paywalls do not stop abuse, they merely monetise it and the images generated under any access regime still circulate freely in public reply threads and timelines. This is not enough reason for the UK government to remain on the platform.