And not just any old bikini deepfakes, even though many AI platforms are capable of creating them. It’s easy to do: you just say to the AI “Put her in a bikini” and the politician, celebrity, or — sometimes — child is suddenly wearing only a bikini. Yes, it’s creepy. But also striking is the way Labour’s ire is laser-focused on Grok, the AI attached to X, formerly Twitter. It’s also striking how, despite pleas from campaigners for years on the platform’s abundance of obscene material, it’s only now that Labour is swinging into outraged action. So grievous is the danger posed by its bikini deepfakes in particular (including of Starmer), that the Government now plans to outlaw them, even as it’s  threatened to ban X from Britain altogether.

This is where the political expediency bit comes in. In Starmer’s shoes I too would be itching for an excuse to ban X. Under Musk’s ownership, the site has made Starmer’s political life a misery, more or less from the moment he entered Downing Street, from stirring the pot during the Southport riots to amplifying the grooming scandal to the point that Labour were forced to respond with the Casey review. And the response to the review, again largely convened on X, forced Starmer to promise the national inquiry his party is now doing its best to avoid delivering.

This is a far cry from pre-Musk Twitter, which was a liberal-dominated hub of respectable media-class opinion, one with a direct line for governments and intelligence services seeking speech-control influence. But since Musk bought the site in 2022, it’s morphed by degrees into something far more pungent and anarchic, where Right-wing voices predominate and many of the former progressive Twitterati have fled to the Bluesky echo-chamber or simply quit posting.

This has not been an improvement in every respect. I don’t miss the sanctimonious tone of old Twitter, but it was more playful. Even so, the rambunctious Right-wing X is politically significant, not least in being the sole large-scale digital exception to the general rule that major institutions are controlled by the Left. As such, the site plays a pivotal role in UK politics. Whether feeding the “posting to policy pipeline”, or drawing attention to ham-fisted efforts at propaganda or speech control, X convenes so large and vocally anti-Starmer a subset of the British Right that we can hardly blame Keith for wishing, like Henry II, that someone (in this case Ofcom) would rid him of this turbulent website.

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So is this just about Starmer’s ailing premiership? Yes and no. He’s at the helm of a regime that is, in its entirety, holed below the waterline by the subversive uncontrollability of digital public life. He can hardly be blamed for lashing out at a website whose denizens, and owner, so obviously loathe him. But the proposed ban is best understood as part of a wider war — as was the killing of Thomas à Becket.

Henry II had his Archbishop murdered in 1170 in the course of a dispute over the competing political and spiritual prerogatives of Crown and Church: a contest that obliged both parties to turn to the Pope in Rome for arbitration. And today Starmer finds himself at the mercy of not exactly a religious but certainly a cultural force, one whose extra-territorial leader also has an agenda that doesn’t always (or even very often) align with Starmer’s own. There is of course nothing very holy about Musk, or the trolls of X. But the contest over bikini deepfakes points toward a larger-scale struggle, with cultural, political, and economic dimensions and between overlapping Old and New World jurisdictions.

The field on which this is generally litigated is “free speech”, typically referred to as if it were an abstract moral value. But while there surely is a moral dimension to free speech, in an information age the power to free or control “speech”, and to determine what counts in that definition, is of immense political and economic consequence.

We are, in other words, once again litigating the extra-territorial reach of something intangible, much like Henry II. But in the intervening period Britain also gained her own territorial empire: and then lost it again, at the hands of our own former colony, in a way that also provides lessons for our situation now. In 1941, the British Empire, struggling against the Axis, was obliged to negotiate for aid from its secessionist progeny America. A key dispute within the negotiations was over “imperial preference”. This was a set of tariff arrangements enacted within the British Empire which gave preferential trading rights to polities that were part of the Empire. This so gravely disadvantaged American trade that its dissolution was a cornerstone of mid-century US foreign policy. Britain gave up on imperial preference and secured American aid.

I mention this not to re-litigate long-dead geopolitical quarrels, but to draw a parallel with the broader context of Starmer’s proposed ban of X. This modern argument doesn’t concern physical trade in goods, but the rules under which the digital kind are permitted to circulate. Many of these “goods” — including everything that happens on X — fall broadly under the heading of “speech”. In such a context, who gets to set the rules on “free speech” is obviously every bit as important as the 1941 battle over who gets to determine tariffs across British imperial territories.

As things stand, the digital “imperial preference” favors the polity in which the internet was first developed: the United States.  The question of geography is notoriously vexed when it comes to trade. Even determining who has tax and regulatory jurisdiction over (say) a pile of grain in a warehouse forms the topic of intense negotiations between trade experts. Intangible goods are still more complex, though: when a website can be served in multiple physical locations simultaneously, who gets to regulate it?

Extensive material and political interests rest on how this question is settled. And this is the real geopolitical backbeat to Starmer’s feud with Elon Musk: a backbeat that, in truth, encompasses not just Britain but also the EU to which Starmer clearly wishes Britain still belonged. It’s a feud currently playing out in a series of bitter skirmishes between the White House and the EU, as well as, in microcosm, between Musk and Starmer.

Recently, for example, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions against foreign individuals or institutions involved in censoring US digital properties: a clear shot across the bows of European politicians who believe they have a right to censor US websites and fine the companies  where these are served on EU territories. In the pandemonium that erupted following Rubio’s announcement, pro-EU supporters pointed out that no such challenges had been issued against Russia or China, despite these polities firewalling large portions of the American internet in its entirety.

But this is precisely the rub. Do the European states want to be as detached from the US as Russia and China, or not? There is no freedom of speech battle between these polities and the US, because neither Russia nor China tries to control what’s published on American platforms (at least, not openly). They just block them, and build their own platforms. By contrast, European states seem happy for America to supply its digital platforms, even as European politicians demand a say in how they are regulated. It’s as though 20th-century Canada was demanding, on the basis of its extensive wood and paper exports to Britain, a veto over everything published in London.

Until relatively recently, this relation of center and periphery was broadly mutually beneficial — not least in that it enabled American politicians to route round inconvenient constitutional clauses at home, in regulating the internet. Under Biden, the State Department encouraged and fostered European online speech controls, as a means of developing censorship tools both unconstitutional in the USA but nonetheless applicable domestically where desired, and aligned with an overall policy of digital speech control. I’m old enough to remember when something being illegal somewhere in Europe could result in its being deleted altogether from X even if the poster was in the USA. In effect, the Biden regime used Europe as a way of offshoring politically sensitive speech controls, somewhat like Guantanamo Bay offshored the torture of suspected jihadists.

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Now, though, priorities have changed — much to the bewilderment of Europe, which now has a well-developed censorship architecture but has discovered its American sponsor suddenly in a different mood. Even so, they have pressed on: two heavy-hitting US websites, X and Cloudflare, have already been threatened with fines under, respectively, the EU’s Digital Services Act and Italy’s “Piracy Shield”. The US-based forum 4chan has also been slapped with fines under Britain’s Digital Services Act. All have responded, essentially, “GFY”. Starmer’s threat to Musk on the deepfake image-making falls in the same category. It is an attempt to exert sovereignty in a space that’s both nominally open, but also in practice wholly dominated by American “imperial preference” — in the context of an American presidency taking a radical new direction.

Seen thus, the actual contest becomes clearer. Is Europe an American imperial subject, or a rival imperium? If it’s part of the empire, then obviously it doesn’t get to regulate its hegemon. If Europe is an imperial rival, it can hardly expect to demand its opponents supply services even as Europe dictates the terms. This is the real subject of the ongoing diplomatic wrestling-match over “free speech”, censorship, and regulatory frameworks such as the EU’s Digital Services Act and Britain’s Online Safety Act. If Britain, or any other European entity, really wants information sovereignty outside the American imperium, the only route there is the one now threatened by Starmer: banning American digital properties entirely from our territories, the way Russia and China do.

Does Starmer really want to go there? Does any EU state? This is perhaps uniquely difficult for Britain to answer. Geographically and economically speaking, Britain is closer to Europe, which accounts for around 41% of UK exports in 2024, compared to 18% for the US. But linguistically and culturally we’re closer to the USA. To take just one of countless examples, the BBC pays scant attention to EU politics, but Trump only has to raise an eyebrow and it’s front-page news.

In this context, can we really imagine an Atlantic firewall? I doubt it. Back in 1170, ridding himself of Thomas à Becket backfired badly on King Henry; I suspect that ridding himself of this turbulent X would prove similarly unpopular with the British media and political class. And yet our cultural, linguistic and digital enmeshment with an increasingly unpredictable US regime has introduced an acute new set of tensions. It is difficult to see how they can be resolved peacefully. But let us hope they can be. Having seen one bikini’d AI Starmer, I have no desire to see any more.

Jordan watched porn “almost daily” as a teen and in his 20s, and overlaid porn scenarios onto all his sexual experiences. When he finally quit, he noticed that he “had more energy and ambition, significantly less social anxiety; I felt more tenderly toward my now-wife; I wasn’t as tired in the morning; my thinking was clearer.” Castro noticed during the quitting process that his impulses to view porn occurred not when he was “horny,” but when he was “bored or stressed.”

This, and the statistics on teenage porn use — the average American boy is exposed at age 13 — are enough to horrify any parent and to produce the strong conviction that something should be done. “It’s becoming a bigger topic,” says Gail Dines, the CEO of Culture Reframed, an organization of scholars addressing the harms of pornography to youth. “This has become a public-health issue.”

Today, the something being tried is age-verification laws, enacted by 20 states, though most have been blocked by legal challenges until recently. In June, the US Supreme Court upheld a Texas law, one of the nation’s most aggressive, meaning these laws will likely eventually take effect. Utah Sen. Mike Lee has also proposed national legislation along the same lines. Our strong convictions, however, might be our downfall in terms of preventing kids from watching porn, and the parent who really wants something done would do well to pause and think it through.

Legally, the debate on age verification has centered around the First Amendment. The latest decision, Free Speech Coalition Inc. v. Paxton, held that the government’s interest in protecting children from porn outweighs adults’ rights for unfettered access to this form of speech. The decision lowered previous standards of scrutiny because, as time has shown, alternatives to age-verification, such as content-filtering software, haven’t worked. None of this is wrong, per se, but it’s a narrow approach by definition. Judges respond to existing law; lawmakers respond to constituent demand; neither group is necessarily thinking globally about the whole picture.

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Since being galvanized by Castro’s post, I have been exploring the available parental-control options to protect my teenage son from pornography, and I’ve been struck by the disconnect between the solutions and basic realism regarding human behavior.

There are two flavors of child-protection: one involves greater surveillance than the other. In the first model, the parent can enable “family sharing,” which allows them to personally monitor their child’s devices, or they can use an app, which monitors the devices for them using AI. (All of my research has been done on Apple devices.) This requires a parent to be comfortable with total child surveillance — I am not — and to have a proactive, tech-savvy personality.

The less-intensive approach is to set up blacklisting on adult content, either on your home router or on your child’s devices. The router option is fairly secure, but it only catches devices on the home WiFi, and requires a high degree of confidence with technology (starting with knowing which box is the router). The option on the device itself is an easier setup but is inconvenient to manage and not very secure. I, for example, locked my son’s laptop using an admin account, and then had to unlock it every time he needed to do daily things like downloading a math app, which always occurred when I was cooking dinner. Then I lost the password and my enraged son went online and figured out how to delete the admin account.

None of these methods is designed for a wide range of people to easily use them. To be clear: all children should be protected from pornography, not just those who live in states with age-verification laws, or those who have tech-savvy parents. One problem is that most of the solutions, in the fine tradition of vapid safety-ism, are designed to do much more than combat porn. Years ago, my brief experiment with setting up a child account on Apple for my daughter ended when it prevented her from using Instagram or watching YouTube. These may be commendable goals, but they bundle a necessity that almost everyone agrees on — no porn for kids — with more ambiguous cases. Each additional restriction is a new hassle, and a new incentive for the parent to just give up.

The numbers speak to the successfulness of this approach — or the lack thereof. Apple doesn’t release information on how many users opt for family sharing, but one suspects because it’s low. A May 2025 study from the Family Online Safety Institute found that parental control adoption “remains low,” at less than 50 percent, and is inconsistent across devices, with higher adoption on the tablets. And online-safety apps cover a negligible share of children. Bark, one of the more popular, has only 7.5 million users, mostly in the US.

Given all this, government-mandated age-verification might seem like the solution to concerned parents. Louisiana state Rep. Laurie Schlegel, the champion of the first such law in the country, told me that, like me, she first became interested in the topic after hearing personal testimony from a young person negatively impacted by porn — in her case a 2021 appearance by Billie Eilish on the Howard Stern Show. Eilish told Stern that she started watching porn at age eleven, which gave her nightmares and had damaging effects on her later sex life.

Schlegel had been observing her state’s usage of LA Wallet, a digital-ID app, and suspected that Louisiana had the capacity to anonymously implement age verification. “The technology is very much available where you can protect someone’s privacy,” Schlegel says. “All [LA Wallet] does is send a signal to the website. It’s not your ID. It just says Hey, this user is over 18.” Louisiana’s law, like the Lone Star State’s, relies for enforcement on the government’s ability to sue companies not in compliance.

But this, too, fails to take realistic human usage into account. The rub, as opponents have pointed out, is that most people just after searching “anal,” “gang bang,” or whatever, really don’t want to provide their identification, even if it’s supposedly anonymous and secure. Comparisons such as those to age verification for online gambling fall flat. Paid porn users already provide their credit-card information, but paid users are an unknown and smaller percentage of total users. Some paid content is also à la carte, meaning the users have been drawn in by free content and then convinced to upgrade while their defenses are down.

PornHub has argued that age requirements will result in users navigating to other sites that the law hasn’t yet caught up with. This is self-interested but also plausible: between ravenous user demand and porn-supplier self-interest, the laws could easily provide powerful incentives for the already shady porn market to move away from porn supplied by large, centralized, easy-to-sue companies into less policeable structures and jurisdictions. It would be nice to think these laws will work, but we’re guessing.

The reply of the frightened parent is: who cares, let’s try it. But if the laws break up the big, easily accessible aggregators, we’ve set ourselves back another generation of children addicted to porn while we figure that out. And we’ve also lost the potentially potent blacklisting tool, which works as well as it does because the companies are well-known and stable. As I look at my family’s situation, I see porn not as a shadowy globe-spanning operation that should be conquered lawsuit by lawsuit, but as a problem that enters our home on specific devices, each one from a massive company with enormous technological capabilities and no realistic ability to disband and become fly-by-night. Our lawmakers should make them responsible.

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I’ve programmed my home router, which is rented from Spectrum, to use OpenDNS, an IP solution that blocks traffic to blacklisted adult sites. OpenDNS is one of many services that can block a high percentage of porn sites (estimates run up to 98%), which is already a huge improvement, especially since it gets the big ones kids are more likely to know. One imagines that with more resources thrown behind it, the black list could be even more comprehensive. (OpenDNS is owned by Cisco, which did not reply to my requests for comment.)

So why can’t the option of a porn-locked router be offered at the point of sale? Many parents might choose this if they had the easy option. And it’s much less onerous for the adult porn-user to just choose an adult-content router in the first place, rather than supplying an ID every time they want to watch adult content. Routers can also be programmed to porn-block some devices in the home and not others, so the adults can flourish, while the children are safe. Custom-programming your own router is too much for the average person, but it could easily be done by the ISP’s tech support, either on the phone or at installation — if companies were required to offer this service by law.

Our computers, phones and game consoles could also, I suspect, come with adult-content blocking, to be enabled or not at the point of purchase. An AI-fueled app like Bark costs $14 a month, which to some extent reflects the computing cost of incessantly scanning for adult content but could probably cost less if it were being powered by Apple. (Bark does much more than this, which is fatal mission creep to my purposes, but this is the fine print.) Apple and similar firms could create a widget like Bark, opted into or out of at point of sale. Or Apple could invent something better if it were legally incentivized to do so, and if its engineers were reined in from stupid bells and whistles. In addition, all internet browsers could be legally required to come locked (via the existing and powerful blacklist technology), with ID verification required to unlock them.

It’s unconscionable that the tech companies themselves haven’t already taken the lead on this. Our wealthiest and most powerful companies pump unrestricted access to hardcore porn to our children, scot-free. A conspiracy-minded person might suspect that the tech companies want it this way, because the rumors about technology uptake being mostly fueled by porn consumption are true, and they want to addict us young. A less apocalyptic theory is simply that the bros designing this stuff don’t really have their hearts in it and have no sense of the average, tech-phobic American family experience.

Blacklisting isn’t perfect, and a clever child could probably get around many of these features. But that’s why limiting them to pornography is so essential, giving clever children no reason to do so unless they’re truly determined to navigate to actual porn sites. Don’t block popular video games. Leave Instagram and TikTok alone. Don’t pointlessly require parental approval for the math app. Don’t make life so inconvenient for the porn users that they find new and unregulated delivery methods. And save little Jordan Castro.