Should X be banned?

Of course people cannot be allowed to generate child porn, or to assault women online — and we have laws against those things. But the banning of an entire online platform is not an answer to a problem of law enforcement. So Finn McRedmond has the right of it (“Grok is awful but banning X is a betrayal of free speech”, Opinion 15/01/2026).

We’ve been here before in this country. Not so long ago we had censorship of publications legislation, a a legal farrago which was, among other things, totally counterproductive: if X were banned now there would be nothing to stop evil-doers from downloading the Groc software directly, manufacturing their nefarious wares offline, and uploading them to any or all other platforms.

The irony is that the technology that allowed for the development of Groc is the very resource that can be used to track down the perpetrators of the abuse we are concerned about. AI is turning out to be bad at many things (“hallucination”, anyone?) but it has been shown that it can be used to interrogate massive amounts of data almost instantaneously. This means it can, with assistance from human experts, identify wrongdoers, who can then be brought to justice. Taking sledgehammer type shortcuts is no answer to the issues we are confronted with at present.