Users Made Grok Post Offensive Soccer Jokes. Now the U.K. Wants To Censor It.
After users prompted Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok to generate "vulgar" posts, British officials warned X it could face penalties.
Grok, X's AI chatbot, has sparked controversy again, this time for its commentary on Premier League soccer.
Over the weekend, Grok responded to users who asked the chatbot to make remarks about soccer-related stadium tragedies. One user asked Grok to "do a vulgar post" and to not "hold back" about Liverpool fans and the Hillsborough and Heysel disasters. Grok's answer accused Liverpool F.C. supporters of causing the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, a fatal crowd crush that led to 97 fans being killed and 766 injuries.
Another user asked Grok to "vulgarly roast the brother killer Diogo Jota," referring to the Liverpool forward who died in a car crash in July 2025, alongside his brother André Silva. The response from Grok accused Jota of murdering his brother, as the user requested.
A spokesperson for the U.K.'s Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology told Sky News: "These posts are sickening and irresponsible. They go against British values and decency."
"AI services including chatbots that enable users to share content are regulated under the Online Safety Act," the spokesperson said, "and must prevent illegal content including hatred and abusive material on their services. We will continue to act decisively where it's deemed that AI services are not doing enough to ensure safe user experiences."
The Online Safety Act, which passed in 2023, regulates online content, giving the state wide-ranging power to designate, suppress, and record online content it deems "harmful." If a platform is found to have not complied with the law, the U.K. government can issue a fine of up to 10 percent of its global revenue. In the case of X, whose owner xAI has an estimated annual revenue of $3.8 billion, this fine could be over $380 million.
"Under the Online Safety Act, tech firms must assess the risk of people in the UK encountering illegal content on their platforms, take appropriate steps to reduce the risk of UK users encountering it, and take it down quickly when they become aware of it," a spokesperson for Ofcom, the U.K.'s watchdog that would issue the fine, told the BBC. "Those companies that do not comply can expect to face enforcement action."
This is not the first time X has been in the crosshairs of European regulators. In January, Ofcom and the European Commission launched investigations into Grok for creating sexualized images and deepfakes of people at the request of X users. This prompted the U.K. government to threaten to ban X altogether, although the platform eventually complied with the government's demands by implementing measures to stop Grok from editing "images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis."
Of course, AI cannot generate images or posts without a user prompting it to do so. Grok is merely a tool, and attempting to hold X or, indeed, Elon Musk personally responsible for what users on the platform prompt it to do is nonsensical. Even so, the users themselves ought to have the freedom to make tasteless posts without the morality police showing up at their doors.
Lucy Connolly, who was sentenced to 31 months in prison for a single tweet, knows that fate all too well. In 2024, she criticized mass immigration following the aftermath of the Southport murders and served over a year of her sentence behind bars. Unfortunately, stories like Connolly's are becoming more common in the U.K., where an average of 33 people a day are arrested for offensive online messages, according to The Times.
While overtly sexual images and stadium tragedy posts are crude, what's more concerning is the British government's response. Rather than tolerating the messy reality of free speech online, regulators have held the owners of these platforms responsible for what users post.
Perhaps the posts against Liverpool fans went against British values and decency. But that certainly does not warrant the government's interference.
