Local TDs quit Twitter amid AI scandal

Political parties and organisations have left Twitter this week, following a scandal involving AI-generated images of child sexual abuse.

Grok, Twitter’s in-house AI, has become the subject of major controversy after users discovered it had AI-generated child sexual abuse material.

Once a main hub for political communication across the world, it has been revealed that the Green Party have made the decision to quit the platform, as have organisations such as Women’s Aid and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.

Women’s Aid announced they were leaving the platform on Thursday, with Sarah Benson, Women’s Aid CEO, saying “the organisation has watched the increased levels of unchecked hate, misogyny, racism and anti-LGBTI+ content on the platform with growing unease and concern.”

“The current scandal, which has seen the creation and sharing of AI deepfakes, non-consensual intimate imagery, and production of child sexual abuse material by Grok, in breach of the platform’s own guidelines and regulations, is a tipping point.”

Benson said, “this online violence against women and children – especially girls – has often devastating real-life impacts, and we no longer view it as appropriate to use such a platform to share our work.

She noted, “this has not been an easy decision,” as Women’s Aid set up a Twitter account in 2009, the early days of the platform.

“We have engaged with and informed our supporters of the prevalence and impact of domestic abuse, promote our frontline support services to those affected and push for positive social change.”

She said, “we firmly believe that social media platforms have a crucial role to play in a healthy society, providing crucial townhall spaces for thoughtful, respectful, constructive and positive dialogue.”

“By leaving we acknowledge that we are ceding the stage to the malign actors, and bots who will continue to overrun the space, creating and spreading disinformation and other harmful content with effective impunity. However, as an organisation working to end violence against women and children, we balance the costs with any benefits to our continued engagement in this space and find we can no longer tolerate this situation.”

The Green Party confirmed this week that they made a decision to leave Twitter last December, as did party leader Roderic O’Gorman.

The party told the Irish Examiner, “while the party will cease posting on the platform, it is up to individual spokespeople and councillors to decide their continued use on their personal accounts.”

Since Twitter’s lurch to the far-right since the Musk takeover in late 2022, Green Party sources indicated that quitting Twitter was long in the works as the party faced disproportionate abuse of its elected representatives relative to other political parties.

A spokesperson for Fianna Fáil told the Northside People that their Minister of State for AI, Niamh Smyth, has written to Twitter asking for a meeting about how the social media platform plans to rectify the issues.

The party said that Minister Smyth has also been in contact with Coimisiún na Meán and with the Office of the Attorney General to “seek updates on how this matter is being assessed from a legal and regulatory perspective.”

“Engagement by any political party with online platforms must be informed by these obligations and by the need to protect people from harm, particularly the most vulnerable,” they said on Wednesday.

They said that if a member of the public is concerned about images being shared online, they should report the matter to the Gardaí.

Separately, a spokesperson for the Social Democrats told the Northside People, “the state should be adopting a much stronger stance against clear breaches of the law on Twitter, with criminal investigations being pursued,” adding that the party’s usage of the platform is “under review.

“The difficulty with organisations leaving is that it leaves behind an online space in which hateful content and/or misinformation spreads without being challenged and where alternative viewpoints are not represented,” they noted.

Social Democrats TD Gary Gannon quit the platform this week in the early stages of the AI scandal, saying, “what is being reported is profoundly disturbing.”

“Grok, the AI system owned by Twitter and controlled by Elon Musk, has been used to generate sexualised images of women and children, derived from real photographs uploaded to the platform. This is not accidental or incidental; it is a foreseeable and preventable outcome of design choices,” he said.

The Dublin Central TD noted that the platform may be in breach of the Child Trafficking and Pornography Act 1998.

While acknowledging that the act, which has outdated language as it predates the social media era, he says that the legislation refers to the creation and distribution of child sexual abuse material, which Twitter is now producing.

He noted that Section 2 of the legislation defines such material to include visual representations that indicate or imply a child is available for sexual exploitation, Section 5 criminalises the production, distribution, facilitation, and possession for distribution of such material, and Section 9 provides for personal criminal liability for company officers where offences are committed with consent, connivance, or through neglect.

He said that Twitter’s AI producing the content may fall within the statutory definition, and noted it is a potential criminal offence, and that there needs to be consequences for those who direct and control the company, which has its European HQ in Dublin.

On January 6, he said that Twitter and Elon Musk have the power to remove the functionality “immediately,” but have chosen not to.

“This is not a grey area or a technical glitch, it is a conscious failure to act in the face of serious and foreseeable harm.

On January 9, it was reported that Twitter was disabling the feature, and it is now only available to those who pay to use the AI image generation feature, essentially turning it into a for-profit operation.

He said that Twitter must face “strong fines, criminal charges where appropriate,” and that there should be “serious scrutiny” of any public body that continues to maintain a presence on a platform that has shown such a reckless and disturbing disregard for child safety.

Announcing his departure from the site, he said, “this will be my final post on this platform under its current ownership. I will not lend my voice to a company that has chosen profit and ideology over the basic safety of children.”

His bio now reads, “this account is no longer active. You can find me on all other platforms- none of them are great, but all of them are better than this.

On Friday morning, before Northside People went to print, media Minister Patrick O’Donovan confirmed he had deleted his Twitter account, telling Limerick’s Live95 “I don’t feel comfortable with the fact that there’s people that are going to use my image, or your image, or somebody else’s image and artificially generate something around it and maybe make it into something that it shouldn’t.”

O’Donovan became an early contender for the 2026 foot-in-mouth award, previously stating that Twitter was not responsible for the generation of child sexual abuse material; it was individual users who were responsible.

Less than 48 hours later, he made a major U-turn in deleting his account.