Social Media: Non-consensual Sexual Deepfakes

Marie Goldman Excerpts

Monday 12th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Liz Kendall]

I pay tribute to the last Government for establishing the AI Security Institute, because, as my hon. Friend will know, it is a world leader. Its job is to monitor in depth, working in partnership with those companies, the harms that are there. I am in regular contact with the institute, which I think is very important, because I believe that the potential of AI can be used for great good—but only if it is safe.

[Marie Goldman (Chelmsford) (LD)]

I welcome the statement, but an idea has been advanced by some that X moving Grok to a premium service somehow means that those at X are blinking, and I think that is for the birds. I think it was a deliberate strategy on the part of those at X to create a content generation tool that is disgusting but that drove up demand, to wait until the demand reached a critical mass, and then to make it a premium product so that it could make money from it. X is continuing to make money from violence against women and girls, which is what this is: it cannot be denied.

The violence against women and girls strategy, released just before Christmas, stated that the work would

“ensure that the UK has one of the most robust responses to perpetrators of VAWG in the world.”

May I gently ask, given that other countries have already banned Grok, whether this is really the most robust response that we could have?

[Liz Kendall]

Other countries have different legislative systems. I believe that our Online Safety Act 2023, along with the other measures that I have mentioned, is one of the most comprehensive ways of addressing this issue. The hon. Lady is right to speak of the need for speedy and swift action, and that point has been made time and again in the House, but the Government’s determination to tackle violence against women and girls comes from the top down and goes right across every Department.

I should have said earlier that the Minister for Digital Government and Data, who is a joint Minister in DSIT and in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, is looking at the issue of advertising, including the monetisation of some of these behaviours. “Follow the money” is a really important issue, and we want to address it.