The Liberal Democrats have urged Reform UK MPs who receive payment from X for their posts to donate the money to charities working to combat sexual exploitation, after the site was flooded with AI-generated sexualised images of women and children.
The Lib Dem spokesperson for science, innovation and technology, Victoria Collins, said Nigel Farage and other MPs paid by the Elon Musk-owned site were receiving “tainted money”.
A series of MPs have called for the government to stop posting on X after the site’s inbuilt AI tool Grok started generating huge numbers of images of women and children in bikinis or other minimal attire, often in sexually provocative poses, in response to user prompts.
The site has now limited the image creation function to paying subscribers, a move that Downing Street condemned as turning “an AI feature that allows the creation of unlawful images into a premium service”.
X users who are verified earn money based on the amount of engagement they generate. According to the register of MPs’ interests, Farage was paid just over £9,000 by X in 2025, while Lee Anderson and Richard Tice were each paid about £3,500.
The former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, who sits as an independent after falling out with Farage, is a particularly prolific user of X and received more than £40,000 from the site last year.
Collins said: “The spread of these AI-generated sexual abuse images is a disgusting violation of the rights of women and children. It is astounding that X software is complicit in the generation of sexual abuse imagery and they won’t do the slightest thing to stop it.
“Reform are making thousands of pounds from stoking division on their X accounts. This is tainted money earned from a platform that refuses to tackle sexual abuse. Liberal Democrats are calling for Nigel Farage and other Reform MPs, if they truly care about the victims of sexual abuse, to do the right thing and donate every single penny earned from X to sexual abuse charities that are working tirelessly to support victims of sexual exploitation.”
Asked at a press conference on Monday whether he was happy to continue taking money from X, Farage slightly dodged the question, saying only that posting “costs me several times [what I am paid] in salaries and staff” who work on his social media.
He condemned the images generated by Grok, saying Reform was “urging that the government pushes very hard to put pressure on X to remove that facility”.
Reform UK was contacted for further comment.
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