Despite pledges from Musk, child sexual abuse material persists on X | Technology News

The findings came to light through spot checks of X, rather than a review of comprehensive data, to which the platform restricts access. Combined, the two analyses offer a window into a social media site still dealing with illegal content that can create real-world harm.

“This is wildly unacceptable that known child sexual abuse material is appearing” that should be automatically taken down, said Lloyd Richardson, the technology director at the Canadian center. “You don’t see this behavior with any other big social media company.”

X continues to use automated filters to block content from being uploaded, in addition to proprietary technology it has to help detect such material, the company said in a statement.

“We take seriously our responsibility to protect minors,” the statement said. “X has zero tolerance for child sexual abuse material, including AI-generated child sexual abuse material.”

The company blocks users who post or engage with exploitative material and reports them to authorities, X said in its statement, including 780,000 users in the past month alone. The company has reported 1.3 million images to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children this year, leading to 543 arrests, the statement said.

In 2022, Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, and vowed to remove child sexual abuse material from the site, calling it “Priority #1.” In January, he said users who asked Grok to create images of child sexual abuse would face the same consequences as users who shared non-AI-generated abuse material, which could include a ban.

Other major social media platforms also struggle to eradicate child abuse imagery, particularly newly created images that law enforcement has not previously identified. Like X, other platforms, including Facebook and Google, also rely on lists of previously identified images compiled by child safety groups to automatically detect those images and prevent them from being publicly posted.

Musk merged X with xAI last year. His rocket company, SpaceX, then acquired xAI in February, creating a megacompany worth about $1.5 trillion.

In December and January, Grok’s X account produced millions of images of people with their clothing removed in response to prompts from users. After a public outcry, X said it would halt the account from producing those images.

Later, the Canadian center found 65 instances in which Grok created sexualized or exploitative images of children before X halted the bot. During that time frame, users also prompted the chatbot to edit clothed photos of known victims of childhood sexual abuse and depict them in lingerie or bikinis.

Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an organization that studies online abuse and hate speech, said the findings were “one of the biggest corporate failures of my lifetime.” His organization gave access to more than 4 million links to Grok-generated images compiled for researchers for the Canadian center’s review.

In a regulatory filing in May, SpaceX said Grok’s ability to generate sexual content posed a risk to investors. In recent months, xAI has sued several Grok users who created child sexual abuse material with the chatbot, saying they misused the technology. The company faces several lawsuits claiming that Grok generated explicit images of minors.

The Times conducted its own scan for child sexual abuse material on X by writing an automated computer program that searched for related terms without displaying the images, which are illegal to view. Links to the images were sent to a Microsoft service that checked whether they were included on lists of known abusive material compiled by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and other child safety groups. Matches were verified by analysts at the Canadian Center for Child Protection.

The Times found more than 75 images between January and June. The program the Times wrote reported the images to the authorities. The images were removed, but some had been viewed hundreds of times.

When tech platforms find abusive imagery, they are required to remove it and report it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which serves as a clearinghouse for law enforcement. X continues to send reports of abusive imagery to the U.S. center, but it is unclear whether those reports included the imagery found by the Times.

One explicit photo the Times’ automated program found on X, which has been known to authorities for at least seven years, showed a young girl with fluid on her face being raped orally. The post of the photo, which advertised the sale of similar illegal content, was publicly available for over an hour in March and received 16 likes and nine reposts from other users before the Times found and reported it.

The person depicted in the image, now an adult, said in an interview that she believed X profited from her abuse and further victimized her by not stopping the image from being shared.

“They’re getting benefits from my abuse, and it just feels like it’s never going to stop,” the woman said of X. She spoke on the condition of anonymity because she has been stalked by people who viewed images of her abuse online. “I get angry that I’m still having to go through this decades later, and that there doesn’t seem to be real-life consequences for people.”

The level of abuse depicted in the images found by the Times was severe. The U.S. national center’s database includes the most egregious examples of childhood abuse and sexual torture.

The U.S. national center shares digital fingerprints with major technology companies so they can scan and remove the imagery. The center’s list is used by Google and Meta, among others. About a third of the images found by the Times were from that list.

The expectation is that companies are using the national center’s list “in any and every way possible to identify, remove and report child sexual abuse material,” said John Shehan, an executive at the U.S. national center. “How are you not using this tool in a proper way?”