The knight vs the edgelord – can Keir Starmer stand up to Elon Musk?

The speed and scale at which Elon Musk’s AI image generator, Grok, has been weaponised over the last week or more to humiliate and harass people has been shocking. The public backlash has been matched by government action. Ministers have compelled Ofcom, the communications regulator, to investigate X, Musk’s company, and have fast-tracked the implementation of legislation passed last year to criminalise the creation of such images.

“Let me be crystal clear: we won’t stand for it, because no matter how unstable or complex the world becomes, this government will be guided by its values,” said Keir Starmer. “We’ll stand up for the vulnerable against the powerful,” the prime minister added.

Yet Britain’s willingness to stand up to Big Tech is reaching a cliff edge.

“No one ever anticipated a situation like this, where you have a service that is used by millions of people in the UK every day being used in such a manner,” said Owen Bennett, former head of international online safety at Ofcom.

The powers given to Ofcom under the Online Safety Act – to potentially ban or fine tech platforms for infringements – were designed as a last-resort “nuclear option”, Bennett said. The act itself is built around an escalatory ladder of enforcement, intended to bring platforms into compliance before punishment is imposed. The problem is that this approach requires tech executives to recognise the pressure being applied and de-escalate. It is a step Musk has shown time and again that he is unwilling to take.

Musk is likely betting that a UK ban on X would be politically explosive and diplomatically fraught with the US, Bennett reckons, making it hard for either the UK government or Ofcom to stand up firmly to him. “The politics of a ban are just so complicated that I think he’s probably resting on the assumption that Ofcom or the UK government would never be able to stand over a ban,” Bennett said. “It would be so politically explosive, and also likely to create such significant diplomatic tensions with the US administration.”

Those diplomatic calculations are made more complex by the changing relationship between Musk and Donald Trump. Long fraught, it now appears to be in a period of harmony after years of disagreement – in large part thanks to Musk’s satellite internet firm, Starlink, stepping in to provide connectivity to people in Iran as they attempt to overthrow their government. While Indonesia and Malaysia have already moved to ban Grok in response to the scandal, the UK is a far closer ally of the US – and it is possible the government would be less eager to alienate Trump.

Beyond the risk of angering the US president lies a deeper problem. Tech companies are often bigger and more powerful than the governments purportedly trying to keep them in check. That imbalance is so stark that former prime ministers and senior cabinet ministers, including Rishi Sunak, George Osborne and Nick Clegg, have all gone on to take up executive roles in Big Tech after leaving office.

“We have to remember that all of these laws are still quite new, and there has been very little clarification of the legal tests and standards required to sustain enforcement actions to date,” Bennett said. Even so, some experts believe there is potential – in theory, if not necessarily in practice – for Ofcom and the government to act decisively.

“Power imbalances remain, at large, a problem for accountability,” said Catalina Goanta, associate professor in private law and technology at Utrecht University. “But these reforms offer strong legal frameworks.” If used with courage and expertise, she argued, “they can really make a difference”.

If any regulator could show its teeth, Bennett believes it is Ofcom. He argues that Ofcom is “amongst, if not the best-resourced” of online-safety regulators internationally in terms of funding, and notes that the government front-loaded investment ahead of the Online Safety Act to hire specialist expertise and build its regulatory framework.

Even so, it may not be enough to act alone. “International co-ordination among like-minded countries and regulators that care about online safety is paramount,” Bennett said. “It’s very difficult for individual countries to actually make an impact.”