Ayatollah Starmer’s X crackdown is an insult to brave Iranians

I try not to compare Keir Starmer to a dictator. There’s been quite enough of that on the internet already, as the British prime minister’s authoritarian streak has led some of social media’s more excitable accounts to present him as a crypto-Stalinist, ushering in the world’s first personalist dictatorship without a personality.

What I will say to the PM is that if he doesn’t want to be compared to tyrants, he should probably stop acting like one. Refraining from banning a major social-media platform, because he doesn’t like who owns it or what is being said on it, would be a very good place to start.

Ofcom has formally opened an investigation into Elon Musk’s X, following days of sabre-rattling from Downing Street. The regulator will probe whether X is failing to take down illegal content, following a grim trend on the platform where assorted creeps and sickos have used X’s AI tool, Grok, to edit images of women – and even children – undressing them and putting them in bikinis.

While nominally independent, Ofcom has acted under enormous pressure from the top of government. ‘It’s unlawful. We’re not going to tolerate it. I’ve asked for all options to be on the table’, thundered Starmer about bikini-gate last week, during an interview on Greatest Hits Radio, of all places. Those options include forcing app stores and service providers to block X from the UK. If that wasn’t already sinister enough for you, Starmer has also been trying to get the ‘likeminded’ PMs of Canada and Australia onboard for a joint crackdown.

If you think this is just about a rogue AI making creepy, scantily clad images, then I have a disturbing calendar of the prime minister to sell you. If it were, why doesn’t the government go after Grok specifically, rather than X? Indeed, this is what Indonesia and Malaysia have just done, temporarily suspending Grok – but leaving X itself up and running – until such time as Musk gets his act together. Who’d have thought supposedly liberal Britain would be taking lessons in proportion from these two socially conservative, majority-Muslim nations?

More to the point, if child safeguarding is Ofcom’s top priority, shouldn’t Snapchat, rather than X, be in the dock? It’s the most widely used platform for online grooming, according to police figures – accounting for almost half of all ‘sexual communication with a child’ offences where a specific platform has been recorded. Bluesky, a woke alternative to X, also has a notorious problem with death threats, because nothing says #BeKind like telling a TERF you have a bullet with her name on it. Perhaps Starmer is waiting until his next appearance on Smooth FM to tear them a new one.

We all know what this is about. Since 2016, the elites have been going through one of their periodic panics about freedom of speech and democracy. Brexit, Trump – these things would simply never have happened, the sore losers consoled themselves, had social-media companies cleansed all the ‘hate’ and ‘misinformation’ from their platforms. They then pushed Big Tech into censoring speech on everything from Covid to migration.

Now, with Musk, they have a social-media boss who is refusing to toe the line. Indeed, he bought what was then called Twitter in 2022 with the express purpose of ending the old censorship regime. And they cannot stand it. Not because our politicians are deeply unsettled by oligarchs owning and dictating the rules of the digital public square. But because they are terrified of ordinary people having not only the right, but also the means, to call out their bullshit at scale. On social media, almost anyone can be a broadcaster, a journalist or a pundit, potentially attracting an audience that eclipses that of the establishment media. This fills them with dread.

Grooming gangs. Illegal migration. So many of the scandals that have troubled this Labour government would have been more easily waved away were it not for social media in general and X in particular. When Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah was welcomed by Starmer into the UK over Christmas, owing to a tenuous claim to citizenship, it took X all of five minutes to discover his long history of anti-Semitic, violent and anti-white posts. The grooming gangs may have been painstakingly exposed by courageous MPs, whistleblowers and reporters over decades, but it took Musk suddenly finding out about it all this time last year for Labour to be shamed into holding a national inquiry.

Since then, Starmer and Musk have nurtured a bitter feud – the X man portraying Starmer and his colleagues as complicit in the ‘rape of Britain’, while Labour has essentially designated Musk an enemy of the state. Last week, the Home Office announced it would be doing extra monitoring of Musk’s tweets, to better assess the ‘risk’ they pose to radicalisation and civil disorder. You need not be a fan of this eccentric billionaire – who has taken a decidedly crankish turn of late – to see the problem with a government treating one of its most prominent critics as a full-blown national-security threat.

Let’s return to the d-word. Do you know what states who ban social-media platforms tend to have in common? I’ll give you a clue: it’s not democracy. China, Russia, North Korea, Iran – this is the dictatorial company the United Kingdom would be keeping if it ends up banning X. How telling that just as the phone screens were going out in Tehran last week – allowing the ayatollah to murder protesters under the cover of digital darkness – Starmer was mulling an online crackdown of his own. Meanwhile, Musk was offering up his Starlink satellite service to try to furnish Iran’s rebels with an internet connection.

Keir Starmer might not be some tinpot despot. But faint praise doesn’t really cover it, does it? As those impossibly brave Iranians remind us that freedom is worth risking it all for, the least we can do is call out this crusade against X for the authoritarian wheeze that it is.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_