Long Read: I want to start off by saying that I don't use Grok/X all that much and even if I did, my opinion would still be the same.
I am sure many of you have heard the rumblings about how the usual gang of nations are looking to ban Grok/X in unison, likely to shelter from the blowback that would occur. This of course includes the leader of the gang, the U.K, stating they are looking into it because they are very concerned about children. You may say to Grok, “Hey Grok, put her in a bikini” and that be dangerous, but only the government can say “Hey foreigner, rape that girl with your friends in a taxi” and not only get away with it, but weep for the perpetrators after backlash.
For those of you not in the know, this is the same U.K. government that has called victims of the "Asian" grooming gangs, of which British Indians have been up in arms about because it hides the fact that they were primarily middle eastern and African Muslim men doing it. And these same victims have been called "liars"(but believe all women), told parents their children were "choosing that lifestyle"(But children cannot consent, except to medication, gender ideology and surgeries) and even insulted by legislators in the current government, including their "safeguarding" minister calling demands for an inquiry as you guessed it, "Far right bandwagoning", oh, sorry, that was the SITTING PRIME MINISTER. Please look into this grooming gang mess, you will be horrified at what the U.K let happen to white girls because they didn't want to "instigate social unrest", "these were hard working important members of their communities", "they had a hard time growing up around white people". Remember, there is never any excuse for rape of all things, unless its for a "protected class". Other countries involved in this pursuit of shutting down X are the other usual suspects from the EU, Canada and Australia, New Zealand.
I mention all the above about grooming gangs because the bleating about protecting children is very much a lie. We all know it, but it's important to make it concrete that similar events are occuring in Canada, Australia and other Euro nations, but are buried and obfuscated just like they were/are in the U.K. So this has nothing to do with protecting children, especially white ones; as we have seen from the media these nations pump out, that even when a minority commits a crime, their "entertainment" version of the show will race swap characters, religions, etc to make the white child or person the criminal and the minority the victim. Combine this with entertainment being pumped out and given much more mind space to the average person than "ethical news", if that "ethical news" is even given the time of day, and they have manufactured reality to such an extent that most people passively believe IST and ISMS and the way society is, is one way, when it's really another.
This brings us finally to Grok/X. As many of you are aware, when Elon purchased the platform, a lot of people on the left lost their minds and began complaining about the usual billionaires owning things; when they had no qualms prior about billionaires owning things, because those billionaires agreed with them. Ever since then, X came under a lot of attacks from attempts to take it offline on an ongoing basis, to the most insidious and evil thing I noticed; Bad actors PURPOSEFULLY saying insane things, making threats of violence and so forth when Elon said hen was all for free speech, in order to trigger censors, EU psychopaths and "human rights organizations" into releasing reports, statements, threatening or issuing fines, etc and the "Ethical media" running with "X is a bad platform!".
Never did I think that people would go out of their way to create and publish content that while people DO create or post, is so infinitesimal because the people who often publish such things are truly unwell and an extreme minority. Only for people who are "fully" there, to create such content on the platform in order to try and bring it down, because they hated that people were able to say things that they didn't want them saying or pointing out. But then it dawned on me, that this was no different than "Jussie Smoletting" of things and the insane amount of fake hate crimes. Some people genuinely see this as a tactic to subvert and destroy things they dislike, by spamming extreme content, flagging it themselves to their "ethical" intuitionalist friends, media, etc. Who then pick it up and run with it, resulting in either more restrictions being placed on normal people because the bad stuff is so "prevalent", or destroying the platforms or peoples they hate. This failed for the most part though and X has continued growing and stabilized after the free speech abuse attempts failed for the most part.
Then came BlueSky. The lunatics complained that they couldn't censor people or band them without explanations(Because if you gave an explanation, you would then be locked into applying that equally to others) and tried many things such as Mastodon and so forth to utter failure. But BlueSky game them some hope. It aped Twitter/X almost 100% and the ideologies members could flee there and bleat about how they had a “safe” and “intellectual” platform where hate was not allowed and all those “stupid, uneducated, backwards, evil, inbred, nazi, ist and ism bastards that deserve to be punched in the face, killed, raped and forced to carry babies to see why abortion was a good thing”, were not allowed. But ironically enough, things got so bad that BlueSky began putting out statements about child pornography, sexual content, threats and violence towards others, because these lunatics would sit in a festering pit of pure hatred and malice with no one to challenge them. But this never made the news the way things on twitter did. No. Not even Instagram, facebook, tiktok made the news the way that Twitter/X did. Sure with facebook it made news about ads to young girls and tiktok for geopolitical reasons, but none of them were targeted as X for every little thing.
The targeting of X was very obvious and just like the targeting of “far right” people when twitter was under leftist billionaire control, it was very easy to see for those who cared to see. Instagram was riddled with hateful commentary, unsavory ads, nudity/sexual content, scams, fake accounts and more; but it never made the news because of that. You can think of any social media, and you will note that it never makes the news because of these things. X was targeted from day one to paint it as a “bad place” just like the ideology spent over a decade painting white people, western civilization and everything in it as “bad” as a means to beat people over the head until they got control. So came the EU fines and threats because “X was out of control and dangerous”, and why? Because people were free to insult politicians, say what was on their minds and challenge those in power(Although let’s be honest, Elon bowed to countries such as India and others from time to time).
Then came Grok. First they laughed and said it could never compete. But it did and eventually became integrated with X. And again the ideological lunatics came back to Twitter despite claiming they were leaving and never coming back. Many of them right from the jump began trying to break it, to get it to again, say all manner of horrible things. They managed to do so because no system is perfect and eventually the “MechaHitler” incident occurred. X took action and their engineers did their best to resolve it. But strangely enough, even this was made fun of and people claimed that it must simply be due to X being a “hate platform” and “echoing the thoughts of Elon Musk” for some strange reason, despite it was THEM purposefully and maliciously implanting these things into Grok and trying mightily time and again until they bypassed the safeguards. “Ethical news” thus picked this up, “ethical youtubers” did as well of course and there was plenty of coverage about X being a hateful and “far right” platform where things like this are easy to do and just a constant. But eventually this died down as well, though people continue to cite this as yet another reason it’s so “dangerous” and the EU as always, banged on their drums about it.
Many more events occurred between and after this, leading to the current debacle of “X/Grok hate women and girls especially, it’s for pedophiles!”. And what happened here? Well, X created a new function where Grok could edit images on twitter at users requests. The intent? Allow users to create media right in the app, no need to go to Grok and unify things ever more for their customers. The result? It actually was rather normal at first, but then came the lunatic bad actors. This was a failure on X’s part for sure, as they should have seen this coming from all the bad actors they’ve had to contend with before, but regardless, the bad actors began prompting Grok to edit images of people, and yes, including children into bikinis and so forth. This naturally spread like wildfire and before anyone pulled the plug, it became well known. Twitter/Grok pulled the plug and went into emergency maintenance to solve the problem. Elon as well put out a statement saying that future image gen would only be on Grok for now and the reason being that at least they could have a users contact information, and thus refer them to their local police for generating illegal content such as sexualization of children. The problem was met and dealt with, but this wasn’t enough. The ideology had managed to create another firestorm on purpose and “amplified” it as the ideology always like to put the things they do, to “ethical” news, media and legislators. “Twitter/X supports pedophilia and encourages it” became the insane new line.
And thus we come to the current situation of where some wholly captured nations seek to ban X not just Grok, but X AND Grok. Which raises a rather interesting question of “Why?”. Once could argue that banning Grok could be seen as reactionary and insane, but understandable. Whereas reasonable people would say, “But the problem was dealt with and the CEO even put out a statement that it was not the intended use for sexualization of children. Things like this happen all the time across all platforms, why are others allowed to fix their problems and weaknesses and move on, but you’re looking to ban an entire platform?” And the answer is as follows: It was obviously never about protecting children. It was always about banning X. Banning Grok alone would still leave X running, and they don’t really care about Grok at all, because there are COUNTLESS literal, sexual LLM’s out there for both text and images. You have likely never heard a peep about them in news and media. No, the reason why X specifically needs to be banned, is because these select governments have been after X due to POLITICAL reasons from day one. One thing I have noticed about the ideology early on, is that not only does it create problems and then enflame them as a means to an end, but they will look for any little thing that is imperfect about you, and try to use that as leverage to control you or destroy you.
BlueSky exists not because it is “better” or “safer” than X. If you go there, you will be horrified by the casual talks of violence and hatred towards “evil, bad people” on one hand, while cheering on and weeping for straight up criminals on the other. It is the ideologies breeding ground and when Australia for example wanted to ban social media for children under 16, they banned all the big ones for the most part, except BlueSky. Now why would that be? Well, if you look at the Australian government and media class, they are all extremely adherent to the ideology. All the violent threats, speech, “hate speech” on BlueSky does not even register for them, because all of it is what they agree with. There is a local weather channel where I live and for the longest time, it was simply a place to get news. But after a decade of slow but methodical indoctrination from our ruling government, the channel has warped into talking about climate change(fair enough), human rights? Racism? Gender ideology and how it affects the environment??? And the ticker on the channel used to have Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. But after Elon purchased Twitter and before even any of the drama, they dropped twitter and now it has replaced Twitter with BlueSky.
There will be no “ethical” news or media or creators talking about the awful things on BlueSky, including even straight up child pornography that even BlueSky themselves admitted was an issue. And it is not because it does not occur, or that members of the ideology are not constantly being exposed for being pedophiles or other monstrosities. No, it is because like all the normal news and media we consume, ever since 2020, so many organizations and institutions jumped on the “We do not need to be impartial” bandwagon and have utterly changed their core internal logic of fairness and reason to, “Anything for the ideology”. I recall during 2020, some news association talking to journalists about how impartiality was actually bad and that they do not need to be impartial about the climate or ISTS and ISMS. This is the working mentality being taught to children all the way up and through higher education, with further indoctrination once in the working world if you wish to get ahead.
Everything we consume is poisoned with the ideology and their greatest power and realization is that they do NOT need to be 50% of the population to say that 50% of the population says this and “the country is divided” or even better, “The country mostly agrees on this or that”. So long as they control the majority of the institutions, awards, “NGO’s”, etc. They can literally manufacture reality as they see it and bury some things in cahoots with their governments or amplify others. I mean, you really think some awful tv show called “Adolescence” just blew up and was talked about by so many “ethical” media platforms and the U.K government even having a session about it in parliament to pass legislation to “educate boys more” naturally?
I don’t know whether X will end up banned or not, but it already has been in Australia an I would not be surprised if it is banned in others aligned with Australia. Heck, there are even AMERICANS encouraging and wanting to see it banned. It’s funny, I remember the absolute glut of bad Tesla drivers media after the election was won. So many of the videos were not only years old, but even of the newer ones, they were just bad drivers. But everyone was going on about Tesla drivers consistently.
We are living in very dangerous times and not for the reasons that “ethical” media says. A lot of you were celebrating after the U.S. election, but from another country, I saw it for what it truly was. Not simply a switching of the guard politically(The wars will continue), but also that the world isn’t the U.S. despite it’s power, and the rot is way, way deeper than most can imagine. “Woke is dead/dying” is the funniest thing.
Excellent and thorough post! I appreciate your rundown of the events and how we got here. And I largely agree with your framing. In fact, I wrote several articles about the Twitter/X drama in real time, going back to Elon's initial battle to buy the site. If I may say so, I think you and other likeminded people may find it a fun trip down memory lane, kind of companion pieces to what you've kindly laid out here.
https://honestlyre.substack.com/t/gatekeeping
Thank you! I love the title already "Enlightened gatekeeping" lmao. It's all so creepy and frustrating at the same time, seeing this play out.
"Frustrating and creepy" really nails it! Haha And I'm glad you enjoy the title. I think the term works here, and if you get a chance to check out the articles I hope you find them worthwhile reads. Keep on fighting the good fight 💪
It's the "long march through the institutions". Marxists lost hope of gaining power through violent action and instead infiltrated the media and art. Wokism is just a generalization of marxist economics to culture. 100 million dead and counting
Fun read.
I really like simple perspectives because they help dismantle bad arguments with little effort. Example: Bluesky is in use because enough authoritarian leftists pretended Elon made a third reich hand gesture. That's the whole reason; there's no other relevant context. So base a lie produced so swift a current.
Spare a thought for all the people who were originally on the Fediverse trying to make it work as a free and open social network before the great prog invasion.
It was a fun few weeks before bsky blocked the racist instances because holy shit were libs getting tossed in the deep end of the pool.
They were banning people off social media for years now, via youtube, facebook, previously Twitter. However, someone who they used to love betrayed Their Message and bought a whole social media site for himself. Since they can't send off angry censorship letters "Biden" style anymore, they'll just ban the whole thing, just like the dictator of Venezuela did.
Note how that worked out for Maduro. I imagine other nations are certainly paying attention.
Still waiting to see if Obama or Biden or both will be handing out the Maduro bounty to the current US administration.
The bounty was offered by the US government; all this means is that Trump doesn't have to pay it to anybody.
The UK just recently landed a propaganda coup with a video game trying to once again paint anyone for "English rights" as evil and their opponents immediately adopted the cute alt-girl from the game. GJ, Mr. Starmer!
And with popularity of the ruling party in an absolute nosedive, they are scrabbling to ban as much opposition as possible. Twitter unfortunately gave them a great excuse they can market to boomers with the image edits.
Labour has a super majority. The fuck they care about approval. It doesn’t matter for now. Welcome to the Westminster parliamentary system.
They don’t have 2 year election cycles like the US.
EDIT : love the downvote for stating a fact. Labour is in power until 2029. Nothing anyone can do about it. Their approval can be 0% and they can still rule as a majority. They hold 400+ seats, they can pass anything they want for 3 more years.
You're right that they don't have to give a shit about elections; most tin-pot shitholes don't. The problem is that their popularity is ticking below "landslide loss" and down into "armed insurrection", which we've already started to see with the hotel riots and stuff.
Dealing with that does require censorship, especially if your plan is to rule by force.
Pretty much. The UK is one economic crisis away from people building barricades on the streets.
Twitter is literally the only right leaning social media site on Earth and it's very much not guaranteed to survive. The powers that be know that if they ban it, they go back to winning uncontested.
UK keeps this up, and it'll go the way of Iran. People can only be pushed so far before they push back.
Honestly at first, as an American tired of foreigners on American platforms I saw this as neutral but after reading this, I hope the ban fails.
The problem is that many of these other countries have contracted out all their comms infrastructure to the United States and are now explicitly demanding the US enables their abuses of their own people.
Your argument makes sense in Japan, where the near-monopoly of Twitter was abused by the US State Department to destroy Japanese political discourse and the push for indigenous social networks like MissKey and Pawoo were inherently tied up with free speech concerns. But Trump and Musk have removed the total guarantee (at least for now) that the US will help you abuse your own population with their tech infra, and so in the EU and Canada, the choice is now between:
Sure, every country has the right to treat their own people as badly as they want. But when you're demanding American resources for that effort, America gets the right to say "no".
X/Twitter isn't really an American platform in the sense that it was meant for Americans only. It's very much designed to be used worldwide. Heck, there's a one-click button to translate any Tweet to your own language
It is an American platform, though. The fact that the entire world lives in America doesn't change that the culture of Twitter is very American and that policies on the site are decided entirely by America.
Americans often don't realize just how much of the global monoculture is just people in other countries adopting/accommodating their American lifestyles, norms, values, etc.
I don't disagree, but I don't see how this relates to the original comment, which said that the guy is "tired of seeing foreigners on his American platform". If anything, said foreigners adopting the American internet culture should be a good thing in his eyes
It depends on which foreigners.
Like, I'm 100% in favor of Japan IP-banning all non-Japanese users from any significant internet activity and forcibly expropriating every data center in the country to Japanese ownership. But that's a very specific case; Japan got the Internet early enough to grow an indigenous Internet culture and the subsumption of Japan's Internet into the Silicon Valley Borg happened during the rise of social progressivism and that basically ruined Japanese politics alongside fucking up the whole country's tech industry. And to this day American management of Japanese social media has resulted in foreigners being materially rewarded for abusing the natives. So, yeah, get foreigners OFF the Japanese Internet, obviously.
Sure, this wouldn't apply in, like, Pakistan, where the choice is between sadistic government repression or Americans stepping in to maintain WhatsApp, but it def applies in some countries and societies.
But in that case, these Japanese platforms are specifically made for Japanese people. I don't think this is the case for Twitter, which was always made with a global userbase in mind. Admittedly, I don't exactly have a source to back that up, but at least with the way X is operating now, it doesn't seem to want to isolate itself to only the USA
Very true; my point there is that being made for a global audience doesn't make you less American. The culture of an open and anonymous web forum built (originally) on texting in your thoughts, and having those thoughts shared to a pseudonymous audience, all built on web technologies that were designed and directed from SF, is just a very American idea. As compatible with this as, say, Japanese users seem to be, there was no Japanese Twitter because that's not how Japanese society would ever use the Internet.
I think OP has every right in wanting his American web forum to only have foreigners who are deeply compatible with the American ideal, just like Japan is justified in wanting their own sites. There's no reason Twitter has to host a million Indian engagement scammers, for example.
Nah, I hope the ban works. We’re at the point where nothing short than the FO part happening will solve this. Let’s see them trash their relationship with the US. Might wake up a few other nations circling the drain.
eh, I wouldn't phrase it like that. I still use X exactly as I have before, nothing has changed. Of course the authoritarian control of people is bad, but there's always a bright side to any action taken: less political opinions from children.
For a general understanding of what's going on, here's some of the comments from r\australia about the kids on social media ban:
I’m a teacher of Year 6. NONE of my class was banned. So yeah, good stuff…
YouTube Premium family plan is no longer accessible by under 16. They can still watch YouTube without signing in, but it will contain ads. Which is a worse experience with potentially more harmful content.
My 14yo cousin is still on Snapchat. She said it thinks she's 22. So there's that.
I have five kids and they still watch YouTube but now they get ads. I think it’s because they just can’t have an account?
the two kids i know got around it by pestering their parents into verifying it for them, which took about 3 minutes.
I asked my friends kids 4 of them the other day if the ban has affected them at all and only the eldest who is 17 has had her socials shut down, great job.
My son and literally every single one of his friends haven't been so much as checked. They're all still on social media.
teal deer
Bad actors of the ideology will cause problems to undermine, "subvert"(their favourite word) and destroy people or things they do not like, often by purposefully generating lots of bad content or events ranging from hate speech to literal crimes(hate crimes); which will then be amplified by their allies in media and news to cause damage for the person or business. X has been a consistent target of this and you do not see the same level of scrutiny or news for other platforms, despite having same or different problems worthy of such. They are now banning X in places such as Australia but leaving BlueSky open in order to select a winner via political allyship.
Good. American sites will greatly benefit having a competency filter keeping the third world shitholers out.
If you wanna talk in those terms, then you don't wanna lose white Australian users.
bitches better learn proxywalk then, stat.
This is the thing with Musk, we have a thing in Arabic where we describe someone as a donkey, not because they are bad or inherently stupid, but because they are intelligent enough to know that major missteps that undermine their entire achievement.
The grok deepfakes are definitely “you are a donkey” moment that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.
The only people upset that Grok does what the users ask are pearl clutchers and wokesters. Which are you?
Neither, it’s stating that a simple mistake in the eyes of many could be used as very efficient legal tool to ban the platform since it directly infringes on a lot of local revenge porn or privacy laws.
It’s a mistake that X team shouldn’t have released in the first place or released region specific.
It's an inevitable outgrowth of generative AI. You can't actively predict the uses billions of people will put your product to.
When you work in tech you're making educated guesses, but are painfully aware you have massive blind spots. In Musk's case there is no right answer.
They want to ban him, and they will eventually find a pretext. No matter how clean he keeps things they will find a way.
He handed them the pretext on a golden platter. It’s a reasoning model which safe guards could’ve been given on rule basis, this was entirely predictable and they should have weighted it against what X has become as a voice of actual reason on the internet.
I love seeing people like you armchair quarterback lol.
What's the most prominent project you've led to completion in your life?
I get judged daily for a living.
It's always the people who've never done anything that can be judged telling us how easily they could correct the mistakes of billionaires.
Big time wooosh for mr I am big project completionist here.
I am pointing out the ammo that everyone is using against X now and this guy is talking about his primavera skills lol.
Got it. So you've never done anything of note, but can definitely do it better than the people who are doing it.
Revenge porn and privacy laws should focus on the people misusing art tools for those purposes. Not on the people who make and distribute art tools. Stop being a pearl clutcher.
Every other AI does the same. Why single out Grok ?
You’re doing the same thing the UK is doing by being willfully ignorant to push your agenda.