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. They are fleeing a platform intent on ending liberal Western democracy, whose perpetual-motion engine runs on pure distilled human spite.

In the fetid underbelly of TikTok, Facebook, and X, child sexual abuse material is easily available and shared more regularly than most are aware. All three platforms swear solemn oaths against it, grand proactive protection policies, whirring algorithms and disingenuous CEO apologies, yet the filth proliferates: algorithms herding kids to porn-suggestions, moderation teams gutted like fish, encryption veils shielding groomers from the light. Regulators in London and Brussels now call it what it is: not slips, but the rotten architecture of profit-chasing machines, where children’s mental health ruin is just another engagement metric.