The United Kingdom’s independent online safety watchdog, Ofcom, yesterday opened a formal investigation into micro-blogging site X under the UK’s Online Safety Act to determine whether it has complied with its duties to protect people in the UK from content that is illegal in the country.

There have been deeply concerning reports of the Grok AI chatbot account on X being used to create and share undressed images of people, which may amount to intimate image abuse or pornography, and sexualised images of children that may amount to child sexual abuse material (CSAM), ofcom said in a statement yesterday.

“As the UK’s independent online safety watchdog, we urgently made contact with X on Monday 5 January and set a firm deadline of Friday 9 January for it to explain what steps it has taken to comply with its duties to protect its users in the UK. The company responded by the deadline, and we carried out an expedited assessment of available evidence as a matter of urgency,” the statement added.

The UK is not the only country to have started looking into Grok’s usage to post sexualised and obscene content on the Internet. India, Asian countries like Indonesia and Malaysia and some European nations too have started investigating the issue and, in some cases like that of India, issued notices to X under relevant local laws, threatening a total ban.

The Ofcom investigation will examine the following issues:

# Assess the risk of people in the UK seeing content that is illegal in the country and to carry out an updated risk assessment before making any significant changes to their service.

# Take appropriate steps to prevent people in the UK from seeing ‘priority’ illegal content, including non-consensual intimate images and CSAM.

# Take down illegal content swiftly when they become aware of it; have regard to protecting users from a breach of privacy laws.

# Assess the risk X’s service poses to the UK children, and to carry out an updated risk assessment before making any significant changes to their service.

# Use highly effective age assurance to protect UK children from seeing pornography.

The British regulator said the legal responsibility is on platforms to decide whether content breaks UK laws, and they can use its Illegal Content Judgement Guidance when making these decisions.

“Ofcom is not a censor – we do not tell platforms which specific posts or accounts to take down. Our job is to judge whether sites and apps have taken appropriate steps to protect people in the UK from content that is illegal in the UK, and protect UK children from other content that is harmful to them, such as pornography,” the statement asserted.

The first step will be to gather and analyse evidence to determine whether a breach has occurred. If, based on that evidence, Ofcom considers a compliance failure has taken place, it will issue a provisional decision to the company, X, which will then have an opportunity to respond to findings in full, as required by the Act, before the regulator makes its final decision.

“If our investigation finds that a company has broken the law, we can require platforms to take specific steps to come into compliance or to remedy harm caused by the breach. We can also impose fines of up to £18 million or 10 percent of qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater,” Ofcom said, adding that in the most serious cases of ongoing non-compliance, it can make an application to a court for ‘business disruption measures’, through which a court could impose an order, on an interim or full basis, requiring payment providers or advertisers to withdraw their services from a platform, or requiring internet service providers to block access to a site in the UK.