Green Party members on Dublin City Council have called on the organisation to leave the social media platform Twitter.
The party became the first political party to quit the social media platform, making the decision in late December.
Ahead of tonight’s meeting of Dublin City Council, the 8-strong Green cohort on the Council submitted an emergency motion calling for the Council to stop using the platform in wake of the ongoing Grok scandal.
While the motion won’t be heard at tonight’s meeting, it has been referred to the council’s Protocol Committee at the end of this month, per councillor Feljin Jose.
Fellow Green councillor Ray Cunningham said “Twitter used to be known as the digital town square. Now the town square is full of billboards showing CSAM and sexual harassment images, and the owner is shouting into a megaphone about the great replacement theory. It’s time to leave.”
The motion, seen by Northside and Southside People, reads “the members of Dublin City Council call on the Executive to stop using the platform immediately in all City Council sectors.”
“X, formerly known as Twitter, has become a vehicle for abuse, and the promotion of far-right, racist and divisive politics. In the last week, several regulators at home and abroad have launched investigations into the platform due to a potential criminal breach,” they noted.
The crux of the current scandal surrounds Grok, the platform’s AI platform, which has been used to AI generate child sexual abuse material.
The Greens noted that Grok was “relentlessly pushed out by Elon Musk,” and said that Grok has been “violating individual rights whilst potentially breaching laws governing child safety and harassment communications.”
“Grok has been editing images under prompts from users and re-uploading said images back on the platform to reshare. Users have been requesting Grok to nuditify images of women and minors,” the Green councillors said.
They noted, “this feature allows the creation of child sexual abuse material, and images of sexual harassment. No action has been taken by the platform to prevent this, or punish users involved in the creation of this material.”
They have called on all departments of Dublin City Council to immediately cease posting on the platform, and have called for all other local councils in Ireland to cease posting.
“We resolve to write to all government departments to ask them, and the agencies they manage, to cease posting on Twitter,” they said.
The councillors said “we resolve to write to the Minister for Media and Minister of Justice, to ask them to listen to the calls by Rape Crisis Center and other legal experts to ensure that the laws are robust in this instance since as it stands is it not. Coco’s law needs to be expanded to include the introduction of a penalty for the creation of deepfakes.”
Women’s Aid and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties were among the major organisations to quit Twitter last week, along with the Green Party themselves, Social Democrats TD Gary Gannon and Minister for Communications Patrick O’Donovan.