Why Haven't Irish Politicians Abandoned Facebook and TikTok also?

The Digital Cesspit: Platforms Awash in Children’s Nightmares

A small exodus, then. Not with banners, but with a series of discreet, final clicks: deactivate account. The Social Democrats, the Greens, a scattering of isolated Irish political and media figures, all fleeing the digital city-state of X. Their stated reasons are a litany of contemporary horrors: the platform’s great, yawning cavernous silence where moderation should be, the algorithmic promotion of sewage, the way it has become a gallery for the racist and the terminally venomous.

But the true scandal, the detail that transforms a mere boycott into a kind of gothic parable, is Grok AI. It is not just that hate flourishes there, but that it has been given a synthetic corporeal form. The appalling images are not merely disseminated; they are generated. This is the new face of so-called free speech: a boundless, self-replenishing midden, curated by a machine that learned its ethics from the most depraved corners of its own dataset. In fairness, they aren’t just leaving a social network…