When Free Speech Becomes an Alibi

Musk likes to style himself as a free-speech absolutist, the lone truth-teller standing up to timid states and censorious bureaucrats. It is a stirring self-portrait. It also collapses the moment responsibility arrives.

On Britain’s child-grooming scandals, he was suddenly very clear. Institutions had failed. Safeguarding had been sacrificed to ideology. The state had looked away. Children, he said, were betrayed. Whatever one thinks of how selectively that argument is deployed in culture-war politics, it at least claimed to be about protecting the vulnerable.

Fast-forward to his own platform.

Under Elon Musk, X quietly dismantled the machinery that made those promises real. Trust and safety teams gutted. Specialist expertise gone. Moderation reframed as an ideological irritant rather than a legal duty. The predictable followed. Harassment flourished. Non-consensual sexual imagery spread. And then Grok, a tool capable of generating sexualised images of women and children without consent.

At that point, this stops being a debate about speech. It becomes about harm and law.

A serious operator would have pulled the plug and fixed the system. Musk’s answer was to put the tool behind a paywall. Not to stop the abuse, just to charge for it. That is not innovation. It is monetised negligence.

When regulators intervened, as they are legally obliged to do, Musk cried censorship. This is the tell. He wants freedom without duty, speech without consequence, power without accountability. But child sexual abuse imagery is not speech. Non-consensual sexual manipulation of women is not debate. In UK law it is crime. Treating enforcement as ideological persecution is either wilful dishonesty or a failure to grasp reality.

The hypocrisy is now impossible to miss. When British institutions failed to protect children, Musk called it moral collapse. When his own platform enables sexual harm to children, he suddenly discovers libertarian scruples. The state must act - except when it is acting on him. Safeguarding matters - until it interferes with engagement metrics or ideology.

There is also a tone problem, and it flows from the top. Musk has repeatedly dismissed concerns about women’s safety as overblown or politically motivated. Platforms absorb the values of their owners. If leadership treats harm as hysteria, the system will too.

So yes, X has become a sewer. Not because people are free to speak, but because the owner tore out the drains and then blamed the smell on regulation. Free speech did not do this. Choices did. And now, when the law finally knocks, the man who lectured Britain about protecting children wants to pretend this is all about censorship. It is not. It is about responsibility finally catching up with ideology.