MPs accuse social media firms of spreading Iran misinformation

Parliamentary hearing takes aim at online harms from X, TikTok and Meta, including use of AI to ‘nudify’ young girls

MPs have accused “complacent” social media companies of spreading Iran war misinformation, allowing political deepfakes that could threaten elections and still enabling the use of AI to make young girls appear naked.

In a testy parliamentary hearing that exposed deepening frustration among MPs with big tech firms, X, TikTok and Meta listed measures they had taken to tackle online harms, but were told: “You seem to be doing an awful lot, and it’s not making a jot of difference.”

In one exchange, TikTok’s director of public policy for northern Europe, Alistair Law, told the Commons science, innovation and technology committee the video-sharing platform did not allow pornography, nudity or harassment, but Freddie van Mierlo MP said he had found “numerous examples this morning” of TikTok videos instructing how to use Elon Musk’s Grok AI to nudify young girls.

In another exchange, Wifredo Fernández, X’s director of global government affairs, claimed the platform was “politically agnostic” despite Emily Darlington MP citing research that it pushes rightwing content and Musk’s recent endorsement on X of the far-right UK political party Restore as “the only way to save Britain”.

Fernández said: “Mr Musk posts and participates in the public conversation individually … We don’t have a political perspective as a platform.” The committee chair, Dame Chi Onwurah, replied: “I think many might dispute that.”

In a third exchange, George Freeman MP accused X of taking no action when a faked video circulated last September on X, Facebook and YouTube showing him defecting from the Conservatives to Reform.

“I’m thick skinned, but it was seriously disruptive,” the former minister, who did not defect, told Fernández. “Did you take any action?”

“I’d have to check with the teams,” Fernández replied, to which Freeman said: “The answer’s no.”

The MP said: “I’m worried, frankly, about the complacency of the platforms, meaning that in the forthcoming elections, in May, they could be seriously disrupted.”

The combative two-hour hearing came as tens of thousands of members of the public responded to a consultation on changing the law on social media access by children, with a possible ban below a certain age, curfews and time limits all under consideration.

Another idea, raised by Freeman, is to make it illegal for a person’s identity to be misappropriated, so every citizen can go to bed at night “not fearing that in the morning, you’re going to find a deeply damaging, disruptive and dangerous misrepresentation of you”.

Dr Lauren Sullivan MP confronted Meta with the results of a recent experiment by the National Education Union setting up accounts for 13-year-olds, which were soon populated with “violent and misogynistic self-harm, extremist content”.

“I’ve seen it; it’s appalling,” she said. “We can’t show it today, but that is being fed to 13-year-olds.”

Meta’s UK public policy director, Rebecca Stimson, said: “We will look at it very closely and take that very seriously.”

Martin Wrigley MP, told the tech executives: “You came in this morning really complacent … you started off by saying everything’s fine. We’ve gone through and demonstrated a number of different occasions when things are not fine and things are not fine on your platforms.”

Onwurah told the tech executives: “In the last few months, we have seen misinformation about the Bondi beach victim, we’ve seen political elections be influenced by misinformation, we’ve seen fake photos of burning US aircraft carriers as part of Iranian misinformation [and] fake evidence that about the missile attack on a school in Iran.”

Onwurah concluded: “The basic fact is that all the work that you tell us that you are doing on online harms and to make your platforms safe in this country is not working … I think that’s the consensus of most of the British people.”

She told them to show progress within months in making their products safe for British people or otherwise “we need further legislation to make it safe, because the first duty of any government is to protect its citizens”.