Why Are Grok and X Still Available in App Stores? | Hacker News Reader

Why Are Grok and X Still Available in App Stores?

wired.com

74 pointsalwillis39 comments

It’s a good question. Remember how Apple doesn’t like porn apps even in the AltStore? Any app with the same amount of explicit content as X would’ve failed review. And that before we even get to CSAM, racism and hate speech on there… it would be a net positive for humanity if Elon’s platform blinks out of existence.

Apple doesn't have to follow their own rules. It's your fault for expecting them to be internally consistent, there's no accountability for Apple within Apple.

Reddit is also in the App Store. It has a significant amount of adult content. They also had some very legally questionable subreddits as well, which they tried to clean up before going public, but I can only assume it’s a cat and mouse game.

I think it’s a user generated content loophole. Since the app it’s explicitly for that stuff, it’s just that some users post it. Web browsers get a similar exemption, there is all kinds of stuff on the internet.

It's not "user generated" when the official tooling of the site is doing the generating, and hosting it, not just linking.

Why hasn't that worked for Tumblr?

I remember when dating apps had to take it upon themselves to never show explicit photos (even privately shared in DMs) or get removed from the store. That too is user generated content, right?

As for X, all one has to do is stumble on the right hashtag to reveal not only spicy content and csam, but also racist and abusive flavours of porn. Something to circle back to the next time Apple claims the walled garden is there to protect users.

X has also falsely classified itself as a “news” app. It’s social media not journalism. This deceptive move has made it a lot more visible. The size of its user base means it is number 1 in many countries in the News category, which Musk brags about in daily posts, when he’s not posting explicitly supremacist content (this has become a thing with him in the last month).

I just tried to generate explicit images in grok and it refused as "moderated".

I asked for pretty run-of-the-mill adult content.

This means that the article is referring to jail broken queries? It doesn't seem that grok is supposed to be allowed to generate explicit content.

Maybe they’re trying to firefight but I just tested it and there was no moderation constraint. IMO this also doesn’t address the horrible content people post there. It’s a clear violation of the App Store rules

You can't generate nudity. There's plenty of revealing clothing short of that, down to a common request for clothing in a single string of thread.

Because people are afraid to hold powerful men accountable for their bad behavior?

https://archive.is/YXBOq

Link in case the flaggers get it pulled: https://www.wired.com/story/x-grok-app-store-nudify-csam-app...

It's just not worth getting into a political struggle with the government and Elon's supporters over the removal. Ultimately, it doesn't make a difference to users who hate Twitter, so there's nothing really to gain by doing so.

Not taking action is also a political statement and I don't agree that there is nothing to gain - if there is any notion that App/Play Store guidelines are there prevent malicious content then those rules must be applied equally for all apps.

> Not taking action is also a political statement

Of course, but not taking action is far safer from a business perspective. The government has real power to impact Apple, whereas X critics are essentially powerless by comparison.

> if there is any notion that App/Play Store guidelines are there prevent malicious content then those rules must be applied equally for all apps.

Apple has a very long history of not caring about this, long before the current political situation.

All the more reason they deserve the pushback. I’m so tired of corps doing whatever they want with zero accountability.

Some things are just objectively the right thing to do. Today, Musk reposted outright white nationalist drivel: https://xcancel.com/FredLambert/status/2009358151272071298

He’s done it before with a modicum of plausible deniability, but there’s no denying it here. Straight up Stormfront rhetoric. And these voices are amplified by the algorithm.

It would be wrong to kowtow to these people out of fear. I thought that lesson was already learned in the 40’s, but maybe it needs to be learned again.

That link you posted has no words from Elon.

It has a bunch of stuff other people are claiming Elon said, but not a screenshot or post from Elon.

BS meter on this one is at 95%

Did you miss a screenshot? He retweeted the white nationalist screed and added a "100" emoji: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G-JsiBbXMAA2r1G.jpg

Let me know what the new goalposts are.

It is absolute horseshit that these posts related to X and their CSAM keep getting flagged. How is this not legitimate content for HN?

If that's good reason to remove Grok and X, then Chrome and Safari should be removed too, since they can be used to access the exact same content.

xAI is actually generating the content, not just hosting it.

When a user is specifically jail-breaking the service to do so, I'll put it on the user rather than the service.

Users just click the "edit image" button on someone else's post, then ask Grok to put a bikini on it. What's the jailbreak?

> Users just click the "edit image" button on someone else's post, then ask for Grok to put a bikini on it.

The user has to click edit. The user has to prompt. Why would you blame the software when these are all user actions?

There are basic, obvious safeguards that are not in place here. That's why the software is to blame. If it was some sort of jailbreaking or circumvention, that'd be one thing. But given the owner himself is amplifying this, this borders on being an intended use case.

> Unlike other leading chatbots, Grok doesn’t impose many limits on users or block them from generating sexualized content of real people, including minors, said Brandie Nonnecke, senior director of policy at Americans for Responsible Innovation. Other generative AI technologies, including ones from Anthropic PBC, OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, are “giving a good-faith effort to mitigate the creation of this content in the first place,” she said. “Obviously, xAI is different. It’s more of a free-for-all.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-07/musk-s-gr...

If Photoshop had a "Create Child Porn" button and the user pushed it, we'd blame both the user and Photoshop.

There’s no “create child porn” button. The user has to explicitly ask for child porn. If someone uses GIMP to create child porn, do you blame GIMP?

If GIMP had AI features like this, I'd expect safeguards. It doesn't. All other AI tools have safeguards against this kind of bad behavior that are lacking in Grok.

GIMP doesn’t have AI features, but you can still use it to create nasty stuff and there are no safeguards against that.

As always with AI, the barrier to entry has evaporated. You can create nasty stuff with a pencil but you can't flood the internet mass producing nasty stuff with a pencil.

There's no jailbreaking going on here. The filters are all functioning as intended when someone requests transparent, skimpy, impossibly thin, or skin-tone clothing even on posts that explicitly give context that a child is pictured there. It's on the service.

Sure, but when I open X, it's literally all over my front page.

Yeah, there is a plethora of images of kids in bikinis on Google search. Reddit and Bluesky have hosted actual child pornography

Chrome and Safari are browser agents, your window to the internet. Where you go is your problem.

X is a curated social network with algorithmic timeline. They’re 100% responsible for what gets posted there. Grok is a service of X, they’re 100% responsible and liable for what it outputs.

Curated means that everything is manually filtered. X is not manually filtered. Just like I can have anything on my domain on the Internet, I can post anything on my timeline and people can access it there.

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