Could Labour be about to ban X?

Lisa Nandy announced last week that she is leaving X. That’s right, the UK culture secretary is leaving one of the biggest communications spaces there is – one that directly and indirectly shapes the culture she is meant to be engaged with.

She has justified her departure – and that of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), too – on the grounds that the platform is now rife with ‘misinformation’, and that it ‘isn’t healthy for our democracy’.

Nandy’s gripes against X are hardly unusual among our political and media class. Other senior Labour figures have also launched broadsides against X recently. London mayor Sadiq Khan has repeatedly attacked X for spreading ‘misinformation’ about the state of London, welcomed an Ofcom investigation into sexualised images on the platform and accused X owner Elon Musk of misunderstanding free speech. And just this weekend, Labour deputy leader Lucy Powell described X as ‘toxic’ and called for the introduction of so-called purdah rules on the platform during elections.

Indeed, there may come a day when the government moves to ban X outright. I don’t mean more regulation, or another Ofcom code of practice. I mean a straight-up ban. Should that happen, it would put Britain in the same category of state censorship as North Korea, China, Russia, Turkmenistan, Myanmar, Venezuela and Iran.

NGOs have backed Labour in its anti-X crusade. Amnesty International has claimed that if Nandy genuinely believes X is unhealthy for our democracy, she ‘should take more decisive action – not just leave the platform’. It is effectively calling for new legislation to force X into line. Funny, that, coming from a charity whose entire purpose is supposedly to defend people’s freedoms – including freedom of speech.

Keir Starmer’s government even suggested earlier this year that it would not rule out ending its use of X if the platform did not act on concerns about its AI chatbot generating non-consensual sexualised images of users. This was a genuine issue, and one the platform did act swiftly on, but it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that the UK government has it in for X – that, as Musk once put it, it wants ‘any excuse for censorship’.

Why does the political establishment hate X so much? The simple answer is because it is much freer than its rivals. It allows people to express dissenting or heterodox views in a way that other platforms don’t. There is no filter.

Pre-Musk X, then known as Twitter, was much more restrictive. Certain views, even news stories, were suppressed if they didn’t accord with the dominant consensus. Some users were kicked off the platform, or ‘shadow banned’, for their opinions on everything from gender identity to the origins of Covid.

But back then, nobody in government called the suppression of alternative views ‘unhealthy’ for our democracy. None of those currently attacking X accused Twitter, despite its censorial behaviour, of failing to foster meaningful debate. That all tells us something – namely, that the current attacks on X are not really about misinformation or democracy. They are fuelled, rather, by the Labour government’s loss of control over the debate. In short, Labour feels as if it is losing its grip on the public conversation, and X is where that grip has slipped furthest.

There is another reason for Labour’s hatred in particular. X is the platform that brought the grooming-gangs scandal back into the open in early 2025, doing great damage to Keir Starmer’s government. Musk effectively forced the political and media establishment to finally reckon with the horrors visited on thousands of young, vulnerable girls over the course of decades – while the social workers, the police and others looked away. He dragged a scandal back into the spotlight that many would have preferred to stay hidden.

Labour and the political class are not just at war with Elon Musk and X. They are also effectively waging a war on free speech. Days after her announcement, Lisa Nandy’s DCMS published a green paper proposing a ‘prominence regime’. This will legally require platforms like X to push content from ‘trusted sources’, like the BBC and other legacy media outlets, at the expense of other journalistic sources and independent media.

This is bigger than Elon, or Nandy’s huffy exit from X. We have a Labour government stating plainly that it intends to intervene directly in the content people consume. Its war on X heralds an assault on people’s freedom of speech and of thought.

Ada Akpala is a spiked intern.