By Dareen Toro
Publication Date: 2026-02-20 17:48:00
The controversy surrounding the chatbot Grok escalated rapidly in the first weeks of 2026. This was triggered by revelations about his alleged ability to generate sexualized images of women and children in response to requests from users on the social media platform X.
This prompted Britain’s media regulator Ofcom and then the European Commission to launch formal investigations. These developments come at a crucial time for digital regulation in the UK and EU. Governments are moving from ambitious regulatory frameworks to a new phase of active enforcement, particularly with laws such as the UK’s Online Safety Act.
The key question here is not whether individual mistakes by social media companies are occurring, but whether voluntary safeguards – those developed by the social media companies and not enforced by a regulator – continue to be sufficient if the risks are foreseeable. These protections may include measures such as blocking certain keywords in the user directory.
