Malaysia and Indonesia block X over failure to curb deepfake smut

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/12/asia_tech_news_roundup/

30 Comments

  1. Illustrious_Pay_1298 on

    Feels like X is speedrunning the how to get banned by entire countries achievement unlocked.

  2. unimportantinfodump on

    You know what’s insane. That it seems like such a simple thing to do.

    Disable the ai until the porn and pedofile content is patched out. But instead they choose to…. Defend it?

  3. Good. If other social media refuse to regulate scams, porn and all kinds nonsense, just ban them until they change their mind.

    Facebook is top scam site for Malaysia, when banning?

  4. Musk bounces all over the place. He folds to autocrats because “it’s the law.” That’s what he said when he shut down the twitter accounts of Turkish opposition figures at Turkey’s request. But when a democracies like the U.K. tell him to stop this AI porn bot, he throws a fit and suddenly starts bitching about “free speech.” Hopefully more countries jumping in like Indonesia and Malaysia will get something done.

  5. Patient_Bet4635 on

    W for these countries. The cat is out of the bag on deepfakes, but that doesn’t mean we have to tolerate alleged “reputable” public squares that do this to people.

    This isn’t about politics, its about fucking standards. In every direction, things are going to shit because we have no fucking standards

  6. For context, internet porn in general is illegal in these countries so it’s already falling foul of the blanket ban

  7. Interesting-Copy-657 on

    What I find crazy is Elon personally unbanned a user who was banned for posting child sexual abuse material.

    He was banned correctly, but this caused backlash as he was a right wing “journalist” and banning people went against Musks free speech image.

    So why wasnt Twitter and Elon banned or blocked years ago

    Every platform has issues like this, but only Elon seems to personally get involved to allow it.

  8. rolloutTheTrash on

    The fact the US hasn’t done this speaks volumes. Then again, they have stacks on stacks on stacks of pedo names all across the board and they decided to kidnap Venezuela’s leader instead.

  9. This is all intentional, we know musk has a huge fight with EU/UK over twitters policies and the huge fines hanging on his head and he is banking on it so that it creates more political friction between the EU as a whole and US when it gets potential ban. The rest of the countries banning twitter is just the risk and collateral and he doesn’t value much.

  10. X/Twitter is turning into a cesspool of misinformation and lies. There should be a day/days of “No X.”
    First, it was the bots. Now it’s the AI.

  11. Least-Raddish1930s on

    ‘Smut’ kinda implies that images are consensual. ‘Sexually abusive material of adults and children’ would be more accurate.

  12. Great job Malaysia and Indonesia! A model for the UK, Canada, Australia and others since X is unable to curb its own system.

  13. Should have been an instant ban by every nation and pulled from the app stores instantly.

    But here we are, companies and countries hemming and hawing or trying to hide behind a wall to avoid upsetting the man children of one belligerent tech bro and his off-again/on-again orange senile dictator.

  14. Electrical-Feed-3991 on

    Was in Bali a few weeks ago.
    Found Reddit is banned there, and my first remark to my wife was: WTF isn’t Twitter banned there!?

  15. When I was on X I remember lots of conservatives saying they are finally seeing less bots & CP on the site once Elon took over. Now when there is verifiably even more of those things on Twitter crickets from the same group. I have to laugh.

  16. Chemical-Idea-1294 on

    And those are not small countries. Combined they have more than 300 million inhabitants.