Starmer would use any excuse to ban X

It’s hardly a state secret that Keir Starmer loathes X, Elon Musk’s ‘free speech’ social-media site formerly known as Twitter. So there’s no doubt the PM was delighted when an excuse presented itself this week for a potential ban on the platform.

Speaking yesterday on Greatest Hits Radio, Starmer responded to complaints that X’s AI tool, Grok, has allowed users to digitally alter images of other people by undressing them without their consent. ‘This is disgraceful. It’s disgusting. And it’s not to be tolerated’, Starmer said. ‘Ofcom has our full support to take action in relation to this.’ A government source then told BBC News: ‘We would expect Ofcom to use all powers at its disposal in regard to Grok and X.’ Those powers, under the Online Safety Act, include the ability to ban X entirely in the UK.

Of course, no right-minded person could defend the practice of creating and sharing ‘deepfake’ sexual images – especially of children. Indeed, it is already a criminal offence to do so. In response to the backlash, X has now limited its image-editing capabilities to paid users, meaning that anyone who abuses the AI tools will have their name and payment on file, and thus can be easily pursued by the law. But this has not been enough to satisfy Starmer. Not least because this is not the only reason he would want to ban X.

Indeed, ever since the Labour government came to power in July 2024, X and Musk have been a constant thorn in its side. Freed from the tight censorship of the old Twitter, British and international X users have been free to vent their frustrations about a whole host of thorny issues that Labour would prefer not to talk about, from multiculturalism to trans ideology.

Take the grooming-gangs scandal, interest in which was revived in January 2025, seemingly after Musk learned about it for the first time and began tweeting about it relentlessly. News that Labour’s safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, had refused to hold a national inquiry into the rape gangs may have passed under the radar were it not for the fury expressed on X. Starmer’s immediate response was to accuse anyone demanding justice for these evil crimes of jumping on Musk’s ‘far-right bandwagon’. Six months later, the PM would be forced, shamelessly, to order a national inquiry. The scale of the abuse, rape and torture endured by thousands of working-class girls by predominantly Pakistani men became impossible to deny.

Or take the trans debate. Before Musk’s takeover of Twitter, it was a bannable offence to refer to a ‘transwoman’ as a man. In 2025, the UK Supreme Court clarified that, under the Equality Act at least, a man who claims to be a woman really is a man. The gender-critical movement that struck this blow for women’s rights would have had to struggle even harder to reassert this basic truth without a platform like X, where users are free to ‘misgender’ as they please.

This has also put X at odds with Labour’s pro-trans instincts. After all, in the early 2020s, Starmer was promising gender self-identification. As leader of the opposition, he infamously declared that, while ‘99.9 per cent’ of women don’t have penises, it is possible that one in every thousand does. X has played a critical role in preventing the Labour government from gaslighting the public about biological reality and curbing some of its worst woke excesses.

Or take the despicable Southport riots in the summer of 2024, following the horrific murder of three young girls by Axel Rudakubana. Ludicrously, Starmer and Co placed most of the blame for the unrest on X, accusing it of disseminating online misinformation and so-called hate speech. You would have thought there had never been race riots before we all had smartphones. It was not for nothing that speechcriminals who made inflammatory posts on X were, in some cases, punished more harshly than thugs who actually turned up to riot. This government seems more afraid of ‘hate speech’ than racist violence.

All of this led the Home Office to announce, in January 2025, that it would be stepping up its surveillance of Elon Musk’s tweets. A counter-extremism unit focussed on tackling the ‘highest harm risks’ to national security would now have the X owner in its sights. So when Starmer says he is simply ‘thinking of the children’ when mulling a ban on Musk’s platform, we have every reason to be cynical.

If Britain were to ban X, it would join the likes of North Korea, Iran and Russia. As insane as it sounds, we should still not discount it as a possibility. After all, Keir Starmer leads a government that loathes freedom of speech, that detests the populist passions of the public and recoils from any criticism of its mad, woke beliefs. The only real surprise is that he hasn’t tried to ban X sooner.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.