9 January 2026

Welcome to 2026, slightly earlier than planned

Happy New Year. Or rather, not so happy. Just before Christmas I wrote that I’d planned to return on 23 January, but here we are. There’s a lot going on — even when we stick to the core topics of this humble newsletter.

The big one is that paying users of Elon Musk’s X have been let loose with an AI image editing tool, Grok Imagine, which can edit any photo posted on the platform — with the predictable result that it’s being used to create sexually suggestive images without consent.

Then there’s Australia’s teen social media ban. One month in, how’s that going? Everything’s running smoothly, right?

There’s more, of course. Welcome to 2026.

X’s Grok AI is undressing women and children and of course Elon Musk doesn’t care

“Degrading images of children and women with their clothes digitally removed by Grok AI continue to be shared on Elon Musk’s X, despite the platform’s commitment to suspend users who generate them,” is how the Guardian put it.

“Concern began surfacing after a December update to Musk’s free AI assistant, Grok, made it easier for users to post photographs and ask for their clothing to be removed. While the site does not permit full nudification, it allows users to request images to be altered to show individuals in small, revealing items of underwear and in sexually suggestive poses.”

And it’s still happening.

I won’t go into detail here. Even this level of discussion risks this newsletter being blocked by the more prudish email providers. Instead, you might like to check out the detailed reporting at The Sizzle.

However I can say that, unsurprisingly, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner is investigating complaints, the EU has condemned the material as “appalling” and “disgusting”, the Irish government wants a chat, and indeed we’re now seeing a global backlash.

WIRED therefore asks a most reasonable question: Why are Grok and X still available in app stores? ($).

“Some of this content appears to not only violate X’s own policies, which prohibit sharing illegal content such as child sexual abuse material (CSAM), but may also violate the guidelines of Apple’s App Store and the Google Play store,” they write.

If you’re looking for someone to blame apart from Musk himself, the Financial Times’s excellent FT Alphaville, a section that’s free to read but requires registration, has put together a Who’s who at X, the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter.

And over at Crikey, the ever-reliable Cam Wilson points out that the Australian government is still spending millions supporting X, using it as a major, sometimes exclusive form of communication.

Update 7pm AEDT: The Guardian has reported that Grok Imagine image editing is now limited to X’s paying subscribers, but does that really address the problem?

Update 10 January: Yeah that’s not true. Grok said that, but as Forbes reports, “Image generation was still available to unpaid users through Grok’s standalone website by simply confirming their year of birth when prompted”.

So why are organisations still using X?

Musk bought Twitter more than three years ago. Since then he’s been reshaping the platform to suit his own needs — boosting his own views, suppressing competing views, and generally conforming to his own views of freedom of speech.

Since then, a key question has been why people and organisations are still using a platform that’s now polluted with extremist views, conspiracy theories, and dodgy content. Almost always the answer is that that’s where they’ve built up their following.

But is it worth it? Probably not.

America’s National Public Radio (NPR) dumped X in April 2023, and traffic to their own online presence dropped by only a single percentage point.

This Wednesday, climate campaigner Ketan Joshi noted that Bloomberg’s X account has more than 863,000 followers but a recent post about Davos, a subject of obvious interest to their audience, was seen by just 5,500 users and reposted a mere five times.

“The @financialtimes.com has more than 6 million followers on X — the vast majority of articles they’ve posted there in the past 24 hours have had fewer than 5 RTs, plenty have had 0,” he wrote.

And personally, on Twitter I had around 26,000 followers but received less and less interaction. I now have about 5,300 followers on Bluesky, about a fifth as many, but have more interaction than ever before.

On Bluesky people see posts by the people they choose to follow, not the posts Elon Musk reckons you should see.

X is far from being the must-be-there platform that Twitter was five years ago, but so far no single platform has replaced it.

In the UK, prime minister Keir Starmer’s former communications director has said the Labour government shouldn’t quit X, despite calls to do so from within the party, as this would leave a “vacuum” for its political rivals to fill.

James Lyons, who had previously worked for TikTok, told PoliticsHome that X remained “an important battleground for ideas”.

“I take the view that your job in political communication is to persuade people, and to persuade people you have to engage, and I think you should be using all the platforms and forums that you can to do that,” he said.

Whether the core X users are willing to be persuaded is another question. X may be a battleground, but can the battles there be won?

Meanwhile, on Tuesday Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, said that it had raised US$20 billion from investors. “Two people with knowledge of the matter said the investment could push xAI’s valuation above US$230 billion,” reported the New York Times (gift link).

HOW GOOD WERE OUR PREDICTIONS FOR 2025? A year ago we created a bingo card of things which might well happen during the year. To see how we went, listen to The 9pm Full-time Bingo Card Update 2025 with Snarky Platypus. Look for The 9pm Edict in your podcast app. We also create a new bingo card for 2026.

How’s that teen social media ban going?

It’s a month since Australia’s under-16s were supposedly banned from social media — or at least from some platforms. While official tracking has been pushed back, reports suggest it’s not exactly an unmitigated success.

The Financial Review ($) has detailed all manner of ways the ban is being avoided: kids creating new accounts and lying about their age, using a parent’s old phone, accounts not blocked as they should be, or simply facial age estimation being exactly as unreliable as we already knew.

Teens have of course migrated to apps that aren’t banned, the front-runner being Lemon8.

The ban has been unpopular with teens who’ve been using social media to build a following, especially “influencers”.

CBC Kids News spoke with Carlee Jade Clements, a 15-year-old from Melbourne for whom 37,000 followers meant both work and community.

“I make my money through regular brand deals, and if it wasn’t for Instagram, I wouldn’t have all of the modelling and acting jobs I’ve gotten,” she said.

Her twin brother Hayden, recently re-diagnosed with brain cancer, has lost his avenue for showing others what cancer rehabilitation and chemotherapy look like.

“All of the people my age who are going through something similar might no longer be able to find inspiration to get through it and could feel even more isolated,” he said.

Fifteen-year-old Noah Jones told Mediaweek that avoiding the ban was simple.

“I haven’t been banned from anything. I did get banned on Instagram. I just made a new account,” he said — and he just lied about his age.

Noah reiterated the importance of social media for staying informed, and for creativity and entrepreneurship.

“There are young creators right now who are losing accounts that could be income or savings for them,” he said.

It’s too early to tell whether the age restrictions will achieve the stated goal of “help[ing] keep Australians under 16 safer,” of course. How do you even measure that? But at this stage it doesn’t seem to have made a lot of difference.

Meanwhile, it does look like the idea of social media bans is going global, so this won’t be the last we hear of it. Not by a long shot.

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Also in the news

• Following December’s Bondi shooting, the government has launched a review of intelligence and law enforcement and now a royal commission into antisemitism and social cohesion. For details of the latter, check the terms of reference.

• “The Australian Electoral Commission will have a draft strategy and roadmap to accelerate its adoption of generative AI by mid-June,” reports iTnews.

• An ABC News journalist gets fobbed off by an AI which lied and said it was human.

• Risky Business has kicked off a new documentary podcast series, How the World Got Owned, a look back at the history of hacking.

Elsewhere

• “It was dark, the lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have, it was dark, and it was deadly,” said Donald Trump. Did he just confirm US cyber capabilities?

• Pseudonymous hacker Martha Root deleted three white supremacist websites live on stage at the annual Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg. With one of them, WhiteDate, a site described by writer Eva Hoffman as a “Tinder for Nazis”, she also trained an AI chatbot to extract as much information from users as possible — and released the information.

• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wants us to stop calling AI “slop”, saying that 2026 will be a “pivotal year for AI”. He says much more in a buzzword-filled blog post. I have no idea what most of it means.

• From Pivot to AI, “The stock market rests on a few huge companies that are all-in on AI, and the US economy is only technically not in recession because of big dollar numbers attached to huge data centre deals that will never happen.”

• Thanks to AI, the police department in Heber City, Utah, was forced to explain why a police report declared that an officer had been transformed into a frog.

• After 44 years, MTV has shut down its music channels in some territories, although not totally. Still, if you want to re-live the original vibe, someone has created MTV Rewind.

Inquiries of note

Nothing new. Australia is on holiday.

What’s next?

Parliament is scheduled to return on Tuesday 3 February 2026, per the sittings schedule.

But since we’re back earlier than planned, we might as well keep going. See you next Friday.

DOES SOMETHING IN THE EMAIL LOOK WRONG? Let me know. If there’s ever a factual error, editing mistake, or confusing typo, it’ll be corrected in the web archives.