Green Party leader on Belfast City Council, Brian Smyth, said that the proposal to suspend the council’s use of X had been proposed by himself and Social, Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) councillor S\u00e9amas de Faoite on Friday morning over concerns about Grok in relation to sexualised AI deepfakes.<\/p>\n
He said “councils have a statutory duty under safeguarding and I think that we have a duty to act”.<\/p>\n
“The council will suspend its use, it will not deactivate its account, because there would be a risk if the council deactivated its account,” Smyth told BBC Radio Ulster’s Evening Extra programme.<\/p>\n
“The handle could be stolen and used by someone else to impersonate Belfast City Council.<\/p>\n
“So it will have to go to full council approval in early February, but essentially Belfast City Council will be suspending its use on Twitter (now known as X) until reports come back from various government departments across the UK regarding what is happening.”<\/p>\n
He said the vote carried by 15 votes to four and “that the only party that voted against it were the DUP”.<\/p>\n
The DUP confirmed that its councillors on the strategic policy and resources committee, opposed the move.<\/p>\n
The party said it did so because “it reduces opportunities for the council to engage with residents” and “they are taking action on one platform when there is a much wider issue across all AI and social media platforms”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Green Party leader on Belfast City Council, Brian Smyth, said that the proposal to suspend the council’s use…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":386694,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-386693","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=386693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/386694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=386693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=386693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=386693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}