When Elon Musk dies, presuming he doesn’t have his consciousness uploaded into the eternal electric ether, he will be remembered for changing the world. Some might think of him as the man who inspired a generation to go forth and multiply, to make babies to populate biodomes on Mars. But to others, he will go down in history as a hypocrite. Musk, the free speech advocate who boasted about banning the (admittedly odious) word “cis”. Musk, the libertarian tech tyrant who transformed the globe’s biggest platform for the sharing of ideas into his own playground. Musk, the man who gave up pretending to fight pornography and instead monetised it.

Over the weekend X changed its terms of service to formally allow users to post what is euphemistically referred to as “adult content”. This is defined by X as any “consensually produced and distributed material depicting adult nudity or sexual behaviour that is pornographic or intended to cause sexual arousal.” 

“We believe in the autonomy of adults to engage with and create content that reflects their own beliefs, desires, and experiences, including those related to sexuality,” X’s updated guidelines state.

As many onanist advocates have done before him, Musk has reimagined the sexual exploitation of women as a matter of autonomy and freedom of speech. 

Pornography is seeding dangerous sexual scripts and severing social bonds

But porn is not a peccadillo, a slightly shameful but ultimately private and consequence-free indulgence. Pornography is seeding dangerous sexual scripts and severing social bonds. For example, boys and adolescents exposed to porn are more likely to engage in inappropriate touching of younger children. Meanwhile, early exposure to porn for girls is a risk factor for later experiences of sexual abuse, sexual coercion, and sexual aggression.

Such findings appear not to trouble X’s policy wonks who have put toothless measures in place to protect children. Users who post pornography will have to label it as such on their account to ensure X’s filters place a warning in front of it. X’s new guidelines extend to AI-generated nude content but says it will block adult and violent posts from being seen by users who are under 18 or who do not opt-in to see it. In essence, with this official policy change X has leant in and cashed in on what has been happening for years.

Yet shortly before his takeover of the platform, Musk pledged “If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!” Twitter, as it was known, was already awash with sexually explicit content as Only Fans creators (or their media managers/ pimps) swamped the platform to drive traffic to their accounts. Musk’s words reassured many that porn would be purged from the platform and cleaned-up. 

Instead, over the past year X has been overtaken by an “ass in bio” army — an invasion of pornbots. Pornographic deep fakes have also become a perennial problem. When then 17-year-old Teen Marvel star Xochitl Gomez found artificial intelligence generated images of herself on X she eventually gave up trying to have them taken down. Meanwhile, faked explicit footage of Taylor Swift was live for 17 hours on the site and resulted in a search ban of her name.

But perhaps the shift from X to XXX ought not to be a surprise. Musk’s original plan for Twitter was to rival the Only Fans model. In early 2022 he launched Twitter Blue, now known as X Premium, a prototype of the new pornography inclusive X.

However, his plans fell apart when X’s content moderation teams realised they didn’t have the capabilities to adequately screen for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other forms of illegal sexually explicit content. According to The Verge, the team who tested the proposals concluded in April 2022 “Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale”. In the intervening years, reports suggest the number of staff dedicated to moderating content that violates X’s terms and conditions has been slashed.

The implications of the move to monetise pornography on X will not only impact “consenting adults”. Research published in 2023 by the UK children’s commissioner revealed X (at that time Twitter) was the platform where the highest percentage of children had seen pornography (41 per cent). Children can officially set-up accounts on the site from the age of 13, though of course there is no way of preventing a child of any age signing-up.

In practice X’s policy change permits what is already being permitted by default. But in doing so, it moves the platform a step closer to the Only Fans model originally envisioned by Musk. That a man with the vision to reimagine the limits of the human body, a futurist who spends so much time staring into space, is unable to acknowledge the harms done from pornography is astonishing. Ultimately, Musk’s legacy will not only be in technological developments, it will be in the adults whose sexuality was stolen when they were still just children.