Last year, following Tim Sweeney’s full-throated endorsement of racist, conspiratorial tweets from Elon Musk, we implored the Epic Games CEO to log off. Now, in the somehow already worse year of 2026, we feel the need to urgently reiterate that message.
At the tail end of last week, Sweeney decided to once again swing to the rescue of the richest man on the planet by quote-retweeting an article headlined “U.S. Senators Ask Apple and Google to Remove X and Grok Apps Over Sexualized Image Generation” with the following bit of commentary:
“Reason #42 for open platforms: to shut down every politician’s incessant demands to all gatekeepers to censor all of their political opponents. All major AIs have documented instances of going off the rails; all major AI companies make their best efforts to combat this; none are perfect. Politicians demanding gatekeepers selectively crush the one that's their political opponent's company is basic crony capitalism.”
This prompted more than a few raised eyebrows, seeing as one could – sans much or really any mental gymnastics – infer that Sweeney was defending Musk and co’s recent decision to implement AI tools that allow X/Twitter users to generate pornographic imagery of minors. Or at least that he was minimizing the harm those tools have caused and continue to cause. PC Gamer published a piece suggesting as much and also rightly pointing out the hypocrisy of Sweeney taking such a nauseating stance while overseeing a store that couldn’t stomach Horses, a tame art game that sparked a bewildering panic around nonexistent sexual content involving a minor.
Over the weekend, Sweeney, a billionaire with at least a billion better things to be doing, logged on perhaps harder than ever to call PC Gamer’s article “a vile lie.”
“I criticized a government official for pressuring Apple and Google to block a speech app owned by their political opponent,” he wrote, “deplatforming 500,000,000 users on the pretense of stopping a small number of users from distributing disgusting content.”
Where to begin. First and foremost, hosting pornographic material involving minors is a crime to the extent that, as Chris pointed out on Aftermath Hours last week, X users could be implicated by downloading the app. And even if you agree with Sweeney’s techno-libertarian stance that lawmakers should have no power here, there must be some kind of consequence for creating history’s most powerful child porn engine. Otherwise, as we have seen time and time again specifically from billionaires like Musk, wealthy assholes will simply do whatever they please if it suits their vainglorious desires.
It’s worth noting that legal and financial constraints have caused Musk to fold in the past – for example in 2018 when he essentially committed fraud by claiming on Twitter that he’d secured funding to take Tesla private, at which point the SEC offered him a deal that’d force him to step down as chairman, which he rejected, and then sued him, causing him to accept the deal. Now, however, Musk owns the regulators, making consequential US government intervention a far less likely proposition. But this gives up the game as to what billionaires like Musk and Sweeney really want: Not a lawless land in which openness and innovation thrive, but one where the laws bend to and serve their specific wills.
Beyond that, if we’re really choosing to die on this hill, we must consider the matter of intent: OpenAI, as much of a stain on what remains of society as it is, at least has a policy stating that its services "must never be used to exploit, endanger, or sexualize anyone under 18 years old." (Granted, other companies with similar policies, like Microsoft, have previously struggled with deepfake porn, and OpenAI’s forthcoming “adult mode” will almost certainly prove to be a disaster.) X, for its part, has referred members of the press to a tweet from earlier this month in which it said that “Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.” Thus far, however, the results speak for themselves. It is clear that X did not implement rigorous safeguards before releasing this feature, and now – instead of taking the whole thing offline until it’s in better shape – the company is attempting to monetize it.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t also point to Sweeney’s own history where deplatforming users is concerned. As Nathan Brown, writer of the HitPoints newsletter, put it: “[All of this] from a guy who deplatformed tens of millions of his own users so he could pressure Apple and Google to change what he considered an immoral policy.” But then, said policy happened to cost Sweeney money, obviously making it a far more urgent matter than something that stands to enable pedophiles while endangering, traumatizing, and embarrassing countless children, as well as numerous adults (mostly women). Meanwhile, thanks to the recent addition of microtransactions on Sweeney's platform, a user-generated game popular with millions of younger players now includes real-money gambling.
Sweeney, like every other tantrum-throwing tech baby irreparably brain-poisoned by a mixture of obscene wealth and an app where people are sometimes a little mean to them, needs to log off. He needed to do it yesterday – and also all the days before. But hey, the sun will rise again tomorrow. There is still hope, dim though it might be.
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Luke Plunkett
