Britain's media regulator Ofcom said on Wednesday, October 14, that its investigation into X will now focus on how effectively the platform handles illegal hate and terrorism-related content, after X strengthened other protections for users in the United Kingdom earlier this year.
The narrower focus follows X's first quarterly performance report to Ofcom. According to the regulator, X met agreed targets for reviewing reports of suspected illegal hate and terror content more quickly, with response times improving compared with evidence examined earlier this year. That progress, however, did not end the inquiry.
Ofcom said it still has ongoing concerns about the effectiveness of X's response when it comes to actually taking such content down, and about mixed reports on the company's engagement with third-party experts. The regulator said it will keep examining the data X submitted, compare it with its own testing, and expects X to maintain its current review performance.
The investigation has now moved into a new phase. Ofcom will decide whether X met its legal duties to protect people in Britain from illegal content, including how its systems handle reporting and complaints. If the regulator finds reasonable grounds to believe those duties were not met, it said it would issue a provisional view before making a final decision.
Ofcom opened the investigation in January after reports that the Grok AI chatbot was being used to create and share sexualised images that could amount to illegal content. During the inquiry, Ofcom found that some users who had not verified their age could still access pornographic content on X. The company has since changed its systems so that material is blocked consistently from under-18s and unverified users. As a result, Ofcom will focus the remainder of the case on illegal-content handling while continuing to monitor its age-check measures.
There are also new limits for Grok in Britain. Ofcom said SpaceXAI, formerly xAI, introduced further restrictions after discussions with the regulator. UK users are now blocked from viewing, generating or sharing pornographic content through Grok's image-generation tools, and companion chatbots such as Ani have been barred from engaging in sexually explicit conversations. Ofcom said it will continue monitoring those changes, while noting that gaps in the Online Safety Act previously limited its ability to investigate some activity in standalone chatbot services.
For everyday X users in the UK, the immediate change is the tighter Grok experience, not a change to posting itself. For creators and community moderators, the message is different: speed of review is improving, but regulators are still judging X on whether harmful illegal content actually comes down. X and SpaceXAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.