Musk's X 'disgusting' for shunning meeting, says minister - as she vows more laws governing internet

The culture secretary has told Sky News it was "disgusting" for X to skip a meeting over recent social media attacks on the UK's lifeboat charity - as she vowed to keep introducing legislation governing the internet.

Speaking to the Electoral Dysfunction podcast, Lisa Nandy told Sky News political editor Beth Rigby that X boss Elon Musk did not send a representative to a recent summit discussing the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI).

The charity told its volunteers not to wear branded clothing outside after it was targeted following operations in the Channel that saw its vessels bring small boat migrants to the UK.

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Ms Nandy said: "I think it tells you that they haven't been held to account for a very long time.

"And I do want to be fair to those who did turn up, you know, the likes of Meta and TikTok and YouTube and others.

"I mean, some of them are doing much better than others, and they're doing it voluntarily." She added: "There are other companies that were sitting around that table who just aren't.

"And X, like you said, I mean, it is disgusting, actually, in my view, that they didn't bother to reply or to turn up.

"I think it says a lot about how they see their, well, how they don't see that they [have] a moral and social set of responsibilities to us all."

Ms Nandy bemoaned that banning young people from social media was deemed necessary to protect children online - but promised to keep using legislation to keep up with technological developments.

"There's no question that we're going to have to introduce more legislation," she said.

"I think we're going to have to start getting used to the idea, actually, that government is going to be far quicker, far more interventionist, and I think I'm going to have to see the law updated regularly because tech is changing so fast that we've got to be able to respond."

She had said earlier: "What a damning indictment it is of all of us as a collective failure that we've had to become one of the first governments in the world to say we are taking children out of social media altogether because we cannot keep them safe.

"I mean, that is, you know, if that was happening in the real world, if we were taking children out of town centres because we just couldn't keep them safe, I think we'd be having a huge national debate about that as a country.

"And [Prime Minister Andy Burnham] and I just aren't prepared to cede this to the private sector any more.

"We've outsourced child safety effectively to the likes of Elon Musk for long enough. And the government needs to step up and we're going to."

Sky News has approached X for comment.

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