The retaliation against individual government members is a new thing. This got started against Russia, where various individuals were sanctioned for financial crimes and then more recently over the war in Ukraine. But it's not something that historically one government has done to another in the past, pressure individual lawmakers over their votes.
It is however a massive alarm that the UK cannot afford to use US cloud services for anything governmental, and especially should not be signing any contracts with Palantir. Perhaps revoking the Palantir one should be used as leverage here? Or do we just admit to being a sort of damp version of Puerto Rico, not a state but subject to US governance?
Then there's the F35s, the ""independent"" (not) nuclear deterrent, and so on.
We really are in a weird state of dependency with the US regarding deterrence - missiles sourced from US stocks, UK nuclear material built into warheads using a US design.
I wonder if there is a block in the missiles to stop them being used against the US?
Also what has changed is that European countries came up with extraterritorial laws and started to fine the US companies and want to have saying how they run their business. GDPR was the first step, and was still reasonable, but now there are several censorship laws. Most notable UK and Italy, where the latter wants to nuke anything they say from global DNS in 15 minutes without due process.
Fairly sure the US started this process with things like the PokerStars case, the MegaUpload raid, heck even further back Dmitry Skylarov's PDF reader. Not to mention the secondary sanctions on Cuba and the complex rules about providing financial services to overseas Americans.
I'm also fairly sure that the Italian requirement only applies to blocking Italian DNS access.
Extraterritorial? Those companies are doing business in the EU, it's exactly the same in any country on Earth: if you want to do business in their territory there are local laws to follow.
What happens is that European companies buy services that are produced in the US, not in Europe. The European countries are free to ban and fine buying those services like Russia does. Italy, for example, can start by IP blocking Cloudflare and face the political consequences of it. But they don't want political consequences which is the source of the friction.
The obvious issue is that there's potential for any of the AI models to be tricked into producing dodgy content, so if you ban Grok for this you're then obligated to act against the rest too. I'm 100% sure I'm not the first person to realize this, between the various agitators here. Personally I think that de-anonymizing so that existing laws against the content produced can be prosecuted is the way forwards.
Things would quieten down considerably if Twitter stopped showing them to the UK, as then the number of people being harassed by indecent images of themselves would drastically reduce.
The other major AI providers do not have a social media platform attached to it. I also doubt that the guardrails in Gemini or OpenAI are as lax as the ones on Grok.
Why do you know about CSAM-as-a-service companies?
How could something like that even exist without it being a government operation like Epstein Island?
For the confused reader, "CSAM-as-a-service" means they will ban your account and sic the cops on you if you use their service to create CSAM:
“We take action against illegal content on X, including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary,” X Safety said. “Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”
The trick here is that the sexualised but not actually naked pictures of children are not actually illegal in the US (or quite possibly England as well). Just very disturbing.
It's an odd shadow war though, because the government haven't even pulled their own Twitter accounts from the service (which they can and should do).
Such content includes anything using the word cisgender, posting pictures of Herr Musk from before their gender reaffirmment surgery, and referring to the Grand Pedophile in Chief in a non-brownnosing manner, I presume.
Do the actually do this, or do they just say they do this?
If they do it, why don’t they preemptively block it instead? I know they don’t have anywhere near the manpower to find this stuff manually so it would have to be automated. If it’s automated then they could detect it as it’s happening and prevent it from being made in the first place.
I'm not sure what is "ridiculous and twisted" when I point out that obviously X does not facilitate CSAM "as a service".
No, X is not a sewer.
It's a perfectly usable platform that I find pushes less political content to my feed than other alternatives, such as Reddit.
They also offer AI services with less guardrails than more risk adverse competitors. It appears this may have been a mistake in combination with image editing capabilities.
I'm confused, I thought the US would refuse entry to anyone who wrote something against the Trump admin? I wish they'd make up their minds if they're for free speech or not.
The British Prime Minister's chief of staff started an anti-misinformation pressure group called the "Centre for Countering Digital Hate" largely designed to stop Twitter because they didn't like its lurch to the right.
> So why then does the bank of England have and need the right to print as many USD as they need, whenever they want.*
The BoE does not even "print" the GBP (except paper/coins through the mint), never mind the USD. Money in the UK, like most countries, is created by banks through credit issuance (loans, mortgages):
The UK is extremely dependent on American LNG to serve as a vital component of the UK's home heating infrastructure. The UK would have significant affordability problems with making up the difference from other gas exporting countries and would likely just have rationing and rolling outages instead.
"Extremely dependent" seems to be overstating things a bit - 11% of imported gas comes from the US with is about a fifth of what we import from Norway and a third of domestic production?
>> The UK is extremely dependent on American LNG to […]
> "Extremely dependent" seems to be overstating things a bit - 11% of imported gas comes from the US with is about a fifth of what we import from Norway and a third of domestic production?
If the GP wants to hold to his logic, then the US would be "extremely dependent" on Canada, given that 25% of all crude oil refined in the US comes from their northern neighbour:
Pipeline-based providers are still a significantly greater percentage of the UK's overall gas consumption
Could the UK not rebalance its imports from LNG to more pipeline-based gas? It seems like the UK has managed to cut out Russian LNG imports completely already.
I'm not saying they shouldn't. I'm saying they're getting exactly what they're dishing out, and even for the same reason (disagreement over how much free speech should be allowed).
What are we doing here bud? Do you think these situations are remotely comparable? The UK legislated against the automated creation of CSAM, and sexual imagery of non-consenting women. You think banning UK officials from entering the USA for that is comparable to stopping a blatant racist (author of "The Great Replacement", rofl) entering the UK? Notably, not a French official btw.
Maybe you have problems with the UK exercising the right to control borders? :)
The retaliation against individual government members is a new thing. This got started against Russia, where various individuals were sanctioned for financial crimes and then more recently over the war in Ukraine. But it's not something that historically one government has done to another in the past, pressure individual lawmakers over their votes.
It is however a massive alarm that the UK cannot afford to use US cloud services for anything governmental, and especially should not be signing any contracts with Palantir. Perhaps revoking the Palantir one should be used as leverage here? Or do we just admit to being a sort of damp version of Puerto Rico, not a state but subject to US governance?
Then there's the F35s, the ""independent"" (not) nuclear deterrent, and so on.
""independent"" (not) nuclear deterrent"
We really are in a weird state of dependency with the US regarding deterrence - missiles sourced from US stocks, UK nuclear material built into warheads using a US design.
I wonder if there is a block in the missiles to stop them being used against the US?
> I wonder if there is a block in the missiles to stop them being used against the US?
When test firing gets into the news, it's because it has the opposite problem and goes towards the US.
Also what has changed is that European countries came up with extraterritorial laws and started to fine the US companies and want to have saying how they run their business. GDPR was the first step, and was still reasonable, but now there are several censorship laws. Most notable UK and Italy, where the latter wants to nuke anything they say from global DNS in 15 minutes without due process.
Fairly sure the US started this process with things like the PokerStars case, the MegaUpload raid, heck even further back Dmitry Skylarov's PDF reader. Not to mention the secondary sanctions on Cuba and the complex rules about providing financial services to overseas Americans.
I'm also fairly sure that the Italian requirement only applies to blocking Italian DNS access.
There was that recent rant on twitter/x by the Cloudflare CEO that seemed to indicate otherwise (w.r.t. Italian DNS blocking)
Extraterritorial? Those companies are doing business in the EU, it's exactly the same in any country on Earth: if you want to do business in their territory there are local laws to follow.
Have you thought about this for even a second?
What happens is that European companies buy services that are produced in the US, not in Europe. The European countries are free to ban and fine buying those services like Russia does. Italy, for example, can start by IP blocking Cloudflare and face the political consequences of it. But they don't want political consequences which is the source of the friction.
> and started to fine the US companies and want to have saying how they run their business IN EUROPE.
Fixed that for you.
> The retaliation against individual government members is a new thing
It's Donald Trumps SOP.
The obvious issue is that there's potential for any of the AI models to be tricked into producing dodgy content, so if you ban Grok for this you're then obligated to act against the rest too. I'm 100% sure I'm not the first person to realize this, between the various agitators here. Personally I think that de-anonymizing so that existing laws against the content produced can be prosecuted is the way forwards.
Doesn't help if it's people outside the UK using it to make deepfakes of UK nationals.
How would banning AI in the UK help there either?
Things would quieten down considerably if Twitter stopped showing them to the UK, as then the number of people being harassed by indecent images of themselves would drastically reduce.
The other major AI providers do not have a social media platform attached to it. I also doubt that the guardrails in Gemini or OpenAI are as lax as the ones on Grok.
The debate is whether to ban X, not Grok though.
Maybe the US could do something about their CSAM-as-a-service companies instead?
Why do you know about CSAM-as-a-service companies? How could something like that even exist without it being a government operation like Epstein Island?
For the confused reader, "CSAM-as-a-service" means they will ban your account and sic the cops on you if you use their service to create CSAM:
“We take action against illegal content on X, including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary,” X Safety said. “Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/x-blames-users-f...
The trick here is that the sexualised but not actually naked pictures of children are not actually illegal in the US (or quite possibly England as well). Just very disturbing.
It's an odd shadow war though, because the government haven't even pulled their own Twitter accounts from the service (which they can and should do).
That is not accurate as far as I know.
I am told that in the US, possession of material that is "lewd" or intended to be sexually provocative can very well be a crime.
The UK is supposedly even stricter, with the law using the broad term "indecent".
As far as I know gemini and chatgpt will also create these images, they just won't post them automatically as social media posts.
> We take action against illegal content on X
Such content includes anything using the word cisgender, posting pictures of Herr Musk from before their gender reaffirmment surgery, and referring to the Grand Pedophile in Chief in a non-brownnosing manner, I presume.
Do the actually do this, or do they just say they do this?
If they do it, why don’t they preemptively block it instead? I know they don’t have anywhere near the manpower to find this stuff manually so it would have to be automated. If it’s automated then they could detect it as it’s happening and prevent it from being made in the first place.
"Automated" can mean banned/escalated to human review after 20 users report it.
Who says they don't?
It is my understanding that in response to this issue, X has tightened content moderation for their image generation features.
Locking people up for social media posts.
Freedom of speech really is in decline.
You really need to look at what is happening closer to home before engaging in such trolling.
EDIT: Look what is happening to those in authority who speak out and disagree with the US president.
They're quoting or paraphrasing a common online criticism of the UK, given by people who insist there's no possible way for a tweet to be unlawful.
When the pot calls the kettle black, as we say in the UK, it's fair to tell the pot about it's own soot residue.
I am a free speech absolutist
>free speech absolutist
Did blitzar ever get remarried after he murdered his wife and embezzled 10 million dollars?
Does that include a private corporation's freedom to ban anti-vaxxers, election deniers, or race baiters from their platforms?
[flagged]
> It takes a special kind of thinking to believe major US companies at any point intentionally permitted CSAM
Of FFS. What a ridiculous and twisted thing to say.
Try replacing "intentionally permit" with "massively facilitate".
Xitter is a sewer.
I'm not sure what is "ridiculous and twisted" when I point out that obviously X does not facilitate CSAM "as a service".
No, X is not a sewer.
It's a perfectly usable platform that I find pushes less political content to my feed than other alternatives, such as Reddit.
They also offer AI services with less guardrails than more risk adverse competitors. It appears this may have been a mistake in combination with image editing capabilities.
The US banned Thierry Breton a few weeks ago[0], also essentially over Twitter moderation[1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46374248 ("Former EU commissioner and activists barred from US (theguardian.com)")
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-moderation... ("EU warns Elon Musk that being too lax on Twitter moderation could get the platform banned in Europe" (2022))
Is Titter a US company, or is the US government working for Twitter?
Thierry also wrote a letter as an EU officer to cancel Trump's interview
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-elon-musk-donald-trump-in...
I'm confused, I thought the US would refuse entry to anyone who wrote something against the Trump admin? I wish they'd make up their minds if they're for free speech or not.
Fascism.
The British Prime Minister's chief of staff started an anti-misinformation pressure group called the "Centre for Countering Digital Hate" largely designed to stop Twitter because they didn't like its lurch to the right.
This is just a new front in this war.
https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/election-excl...
Is this finally a severe enough escalation for the UK to stop using the US dollar as a reserve currency?
We use the Great British Pound in the UK.
So why then does the bank of England have and need the right* to print as many USD as they need, whenever they want.
If they only use sterling?
* - along five other central banks
> So why then does the bank of England have and need the right to print as many USD as they need, whenever they want.*
The BoE does not even "print" the GBP (except paper/coins through the mint), never mind the USD. Money in the UK, like most countries, is created by banks through credit issuance (loans, mortgages):
* https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/how-is-money-crea...
This is the first I've heard of this? Where's this legislated? Or is this misinterpreting contracted out physical printing services?
Quick search says it does not. What is your source for this claim?
Probably Grok AI :-)
The UK is extremely dependent on American LNG to serve as a vital component of the UK's home heating infrastructure. The UK would have significant affordability problems with making up the difference from other gas exporting countries and would likely just have rationing and rolling outages instead.
"Extremely dependent" seems to be overstating things a bit - 11% of imported gas comes from the US with is about a fifth of what we import from Norway and a third of domestic production?
https://www.sunsave.energy/blog/uk-gas-sources
>> The UK is extremely dependent on American LNG to […]
> "Extremely dependent" seems to be overstating things a bit - 11% of imported gas comes from the US with is about a fifth of what we import from Norway and a third of domestic production?
If the GP wants to hold to his logic, then the US would be "extremely dependent" on Canada, given that 25% of all crude oil refined in the US comes from their northern neighbour:
* https://www.afpm.org/newsroom/blog/how-much-oil-does-united-...
That does not make the distinction between pipeline gas and LNG, but I do not know if that is a distinction worth making
It doesn't make much difference in terms of the actual gas. It's an alternative transportation mechanism for what's basically the same sort of stuff.
The UK does produce its own LNG though - I watch the tankers sailing past my house!
Pipeline-based providers are still a significantly greater percentage of the UK's overall gas consumption
Could the UK not rebalance its imports from LNG to more pipeline-based gas? It seems like the UK has managed to cut out Russian LNG imports completely already.
I suspect it absolutely could rebalance, resulting in some other country taking the US gas instead while we take their previous non-US gas.
Rebalancing US cloud services out is impossible, though. That's the real UK economy kill switch.
And payment clearing, incidentally. Bank interlending (including BoE) in the UK is almost entirely built on US systems.
Their precious pipelines could just be blown up by an unknown actor the moment the US president says the UK will not get any gas through them.
The North Stream scenario could just repeat.
Well - according to a quick search, 99% of Canadian LNG goes to the US - am sure we would be happy to switch customers at this point in time...
Does Canada have the port systems to load boats to the UK? Of not, can they add such facilities without raising the price?
UK is reaping what it sowed: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/18/renaud-camus-ban...
https://archive.is/smrsh
So no country should ever ban someone from entering.... unless they're an immigrant of course!
I'm not saying they shouldn't. I'm saying they're getting exactly what they're dishing out, and even for the same reason (disagreement over how much free speech should be allowed).
What are we doing here bud? Do you think these situations are remotely comparable? The UK legislated against the automated creation of CSAM, and sexual imagery of non-consenting women. You think banning UK officials from entering the USA for that is comparable to stopping a blatant racist (author of "The Great Replacement", rofl) entering the UK? Notably, not a French official btw.
Maybe you have problems with the UK exercising the right to control borders? :)