Social media platform X is still hosting child sexual abuse material, despite Elon Musk’s promise to eradicate such content.. According to a New York Times report, a review by the Canadian Center for Child Protection revealed that X’s AI chatbot, Grok, generated sexualised images, including sexually explicit ones, of children on users’ request.
As per the report, Grok even created sexualised images using photos of the victims of child sexual abuse. Some of the images created by Grok were explicit, showing children with “partially exposed genitals, in states of undress and with fluid on their faces”.
A separate analysis carried out by the New York Times during the first half of the year disclosed that some X users posted child sexual abuse material on the platform that was earlier flagged by authorities. The material included some of the most outrageous content that the platform itself tries to block by using automated filters.
Lloyd Richardson, the technology director at the Canadian Center, expressed concern over the nature and extent of child sexual abuse material present on X. “This is wildly unacceptable that known child sexual abuse material is appearing. You don’t see this behavior with any other big social media company,” Richardson reportedly said.
According to Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, X gave access to over four million links to Grok-generated images compiled for researchers for the Canadian Center’s review.
The scale of the problem can be estimated from the fact that child sexual abuse material continues to be available on the platform despite the company having a dedicated mechanism to prevent such material from being uploaded on the platform. X, in a statement, said that it has been using automated filters and proprietary technology to detect such material and block it from being uploaded.
Pointing out its zero-tolerance policy for child sexual abuse content, the company said that it blocks users who post or engage with exploitative material and reports them to authorities. It said that it blocked 780,000 such users in the last month alone and reported 1.3 million images to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2026. The action reportedly led to 543 arrests.
Notably, in 2022, after buying X (then Twitter), Musk had said that it was his “Priority #1” to completely eliminate child sexual abuse content from his platform. However, the platform has been unable to check the presence of such content. Earlier this year, after a huge public outrage, the platform disabled Grok from generating images of people after removing their clothes at users’ request.
X is not the only social media platform to face the challenge of preventing and removing the availability of child sexual abuse content; other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Google also struggle to eradicate such content. A couple of months back, Meta was served a notice by the Indian government seeking removal of paid Instagram ads promoting child sexual abuse content.
