Turkish Court Orders Block On X’s Grok For Insulting Leaders
Grok. Illustration: Unsplash/Mariia Shalabaieva
By Hamdi Firat Buyuk
The Prosecutors’ Office in Ankara said it had started an investigation into insulting language on X’s AI tool Grok after it shared vulgar posts about President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his mother and the Prophet Muhammad among others.
“Following Grok’s insults against [Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal] Ataturk, our esteemed President [Recep Tayyip Erdogan], and the Prophet Muhammad, the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office .. applied to the criminal court … for an access ban. The court issued the access restriction order and forwarded it to the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) to be delivered to the internet service provider,” the prosecutors’ office wrote on Wednesday.
The BTK is expected to block access to Grok. But, at the time of publication, Grok remains accessible and it is also not clear how Grok will be blocked technically, given that it is deeply integrated within the X platform.
‘X’ has accepted that Grok’s language has been “inappropriate”.
“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts. Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved,” X said.
Since a recent update that X owner Elon Musk announced on July 6, Grok has started to use insulting language across the globe about various politically and sensitive topics.
Under President Erdogan’s rule, Turkey has blocked many social media platforms, including YouTube, Wikipedia, X, Instagram and TikTok, using draconian laws and regulations.
Courts and public agencies are increasingly ordering access blocks to social media content. The watchdog Freedom House’s Internet Freedom Status ranking classifies Turkey as “not free”.
Balkan Insight
The Balkan Insight (formerly the Balkin Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN) is a close group of editors and trainers that enables journalists in the region to produce in-depth analytical and investigative journalism on complex political, economic and social themes. BIRN emerged from the Balkan programme of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, IWPR, in 2005. The original IWPR Balkans team was mandated to localise that programme and make it sustainable, in light of changing realities in the region and the maturity of the IWPR intervention. Since then, its work in publishing, media training and public debate activities has become synonymous with quality, reliability and impartiality. A fully-independent and local network, it is now developing as an efficient and self-sustainable regional institution to enhance the capacity for journalism that pushes for public debate on European-oriented political and economic reform.
No comments:
Post a Comment