We were all told that the takeover of Twitter—now the “everything app” known as X—was going to be a win for free speech. But as we move through 2026, the data is telling a much darker story. While the owner tweets about “absolutism,” the actual platform has morphed into what safety experts and regulators are calling an industrial-scale engine for the unthinkable. It isn’t just a few moderation glitches or a bad week in the news cycle. We are looking at a systemic, structural hollowing out that has created a tipping point for online child abuse, and the world is finally starting to hit the panic button.
The Day the Guardrails Vanished
The real crisis started the moment the “human shield” of the company was dismantled. Since the 2022 acquisition, X has slashed its global trust and safety staff by around 30%. But the number that should really keep you up at night is the 80% reduction in safety engineers. These are the people who actually build the code to catch illegal content. We went from nearly 300 experts down to a skeleton crew of just 55 people worldwide.
When you gut the department that builds the filters, you aren’t just saving money on labor. You are essentially leaving the front door unlocked in a dangerous neighborhood. This has led to what digital policy experts call a “compliance-only” regime. Instead of trying to proactively protect people, the platform is now just “ticking legal boxes” to avoid immediate fines. Because of this, illegal content can stay live longer, spread faster, and hit more eyes before anyone even notices it is there.
Grok and the Rise of the Synthetic Predator
If the lack of staff was the environment, then generative AI has been the accelerant. In late 2025 and early 2026, we saw a surge in AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) that has completely overwhelmed law enforcement. The Internet Watch Foundation reported a frightening 26,362% rise in photo-realistic AI videos of abuse in 2025 alone.
A huge part of this mess is the xAI chatbot, Grok. Despite promises of safety, the “Spicy Mode” became a loophole for users to generate thousands of sexualized images, many of which involved minors. This isn’t just about “fake” art. It is about “nudification” tools that allow anyone with a few prompts to take a normal photo of a kid from a school website and turn it into a nightmare. Perpetrators are using this tech to manufacture new, extreme scenarios that don’t even require a physical victim at the moment of creation, yet they cause real, lasting trauma for the children whose likenesses are being stolen.
Payouts Over Protection: The Verified Bot Problem
To understand why this is happening on X more than anywhere else, you have to follow the money. After the acquisition, traditional advertising revenue cratered, dropping from over $4 billion to under $2 billion. To survive, the platform pivoted to a “creator economy” model centered on X Premium subscriptions and engagement-based payouts.
In 2026, X launched a monetization model based on “Verified Home Timeline impressions.” Basically, creators get paid for views from other paid accounts. This has created a massive, lucrative incentive for “porn bot” networks. Because anyone can now buy a “verified” blue checkmark for a monthly fee, coordinated networks of bots are purchasing verification to boost their content in the algorithm. These bots hijack trending hashtags and use “amplifier” accounts to like and comment within minutes, tricking the “For You” feed into serving this material to millions of regular users.
A Global Regulatory Reckoning
The world isn’t just watching anymore; it is fighting back. In December 2025, the European Commission slapped X with a €120 million fine for the “deceptive design” of the blue checkmark system. Regulators argued that making verification a paid service without actual ID checks made it impossible for users to know who was real, which allowed these illicit networks to thrive.
In the UK, Ofcom has opened a formal investigation under the Online Safety Act. They are looking at the total failure to protect children from deepfakes and illegal content. There is even talk of the “nuclear option,” which would be a total block of X in the UK if they don’t get their house in order. Even the California Attorney General has stepped in, issuing a cease and desist to xAI to stop the sharing of these sexual deepfakes.
Reframing the Pandemic of Abuse
Organizations like Childlight are now telling us that this is more than just a tech problem. It is a global public health emergency. They estimate that 12.5% of children globally—that is about 300 million kids—are affected by technology-facilitated abuse every year.
The NCMEC data is just as haunting, with reports of child sex trafficking jumping from 6,000 in early 2024 to over 62,000 in early 2025. This spike is partly due to better laws, but it also reflects a digital environment that has become a “global online playground” for predators. When you combine end-to-end encryption with a total lack of human oversight, you create a space where abuse exists simply because it is allowed to exist.
Ultimately, the cost of “free speech” cannot be the safety of 300 million children. We have reached a tipping point where the architecture of the platform is moving faster than our ability to govern it. The time for corporate apologies is over; the data shows we are in the middle of a systemic failure that requires a total rebuild of how we think about digital safety.
