O'Neill said X's response to date had been of concern. "X have been woefully, woefully inadequate in terms of their response," the first minister said. "Where they (social media companies) fail to act then I do believe the governments should step in. I think there's a lot more conversation to be had – certainly here at a local level." O'Neill added: "We're going to continue to work with (Justice Minister) Naomi Long in terms of what we can do." DUP leader Gavin Robinson said there is clearly a "vulnerability" across social media in relation to the "proliferation of explicit content and engineered content". He said a UK-wide position was needed around the "appropriate regulation not just of existing technology and platforms but the potentials of the futures through AI." The Green Party of Northern Ireland has also said it will stop using X. "The platform has repeatedly failed to fully deal with child sexual abuse material, deepfake abuse and coordinated disinformation," Belfast city councillor Brian Smyth said. "Those failures are structural, not accidental." 'Helpful platform for the modern age' Kevin Curran, a professor of cyber security at Ulster University, admits to spending an average of three hours each day on X, using it mostly as a news source and also to connect with colleagues "Of course there are opinions on X I find horrendous, but it is still a helpful platform for the modern age," he told BBC News NI's Evening Extra programme. Curran acknowledged the importance of online regulations but said there should be a separation between a "political attack on Musk, and correct policing". "Is this decision by Ofcom going to apply across all social media sites, or is it specific to X?" he asked. "Ten daily inappropriate posts in a pool of 280 million, does that really warrant a complete ban on a platform?" The use of Grok to generate non-consensual sexualised images has been condemned by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who called it "disgraceful" and "disgusting". X has now limited the use of AI image function to those who pay a monthly fee, a change dubbed by Downing Street as "insulting" to victims of sexual violence. Ofcom's powers under the Online Safety Act include being able to seek a court order to prevent third parties from helping X raise money or preventing it from being accessed in the UK, should the firm refuse to comply. However these so-called business disruption measures remain largely untested. Ofcom investigates Elon Musk's X over Grok AI sexual deepfakes