OTTAWA — Canada’s efforts to combat the rash of disturbing deepfake images on Elon Musk’s X could face legislative delays and pressures from the U.S. as the Liberals rush to catch up to other countries that have modernized their digital regulations.

The United Kingdom and the European Union moved aggressively over the last week to make X address the proliferation of explicit content generated by Musk’s AI chatbot Grok, which sometimes features sexual or degrading images of women and children. The U.K.’s media regulator, Ofcom, launched an investigation into the platform, and the EU threatened X with heavy sanctions. On Monday, Indonesia and Malaysia blocked Grok AI outright. Canada’s response, by comparison, has been muted.

The government plans to use existing laws to press platforms to remove illegal content quickly, said AI Minister Evan Solomon’s director of communication Peter Wall. But unlike the U.K. and EU, Canada does not have any legislation to regulate the content on social media platforms, having failed to pass its controversial Online Harms Bill before the last election. 

That leaves Ottawa with few options to take immediate action against X, said Heidi Tworek, director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia. In 2022, she was appointed to an advisory group on online safety by the previous Liberal government. 

Canadian officials met last week with U.K. counterparts to discuss the images on Grok, but Solomon was quick to shut down any suggestion that Canada is contemplating banning the platform outright. Wall would not provide details about the discussion with the U.K. 

Instead, the government plans to tackle deepfake images online with three legislative moves, only one of which is before Parliament. That means it could be years before they’re in force. The first, a justice bill tabled last month, would make it illegal for individuals to post sexually explicit deepfakes online. The government is also contemplating updating Canada’s privacy legislation, and plans to reboot some elements of its Online Harms Bill this year, which could target platforms directly. 

“Our government wants Canadians to be safe as they navigate the digital world, and platforms have an important role to play in meeting that responsibility,” said Heritage Minister Marc Miller’s press secretary Hermine Landry in a statement. 

For the government, the risk is unintended consequences. Holding platforms to account for harmful content hosted on their sites could attract the ire of U.S. President Donald Trump, said Tworek—especially in the lead-up to the renegotiation of Canada’s trade agreement with the U.S. and Mexico. “The politics part is influencing the policy aspect of things,” she said 

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told a congressional committee last month that he sees Canada’s previous attempts to regulate online platforms through the Online News Act and the Online Streaming Act as irritants in the lead-up to the trade pact review. 

The same day, the White House threatened to retaliate against European service providers with fees and penalties over what the U.S. trade representative described as “discriminatory and harassing lawsuits, taxes, fines and directives against U.S. service providers,” after the EU’s tech regulator sanctioned X with a €120-million fine for breaching the union’s Digital Services Act. 

The State Department also barred one of the architects of that law, former European Commissioner Thierry Breton, from visiting the U.S.

“These things will not have escaped the notice of the Canadian government as they continue to think about what they do in the Online Harms Act,” said Tworek. 

X responded to the deepfake controversy by limiting Grok’s image-generation features to verified users who pay to use extra features on the platform. X’s parent company, xAI, did not respond to The Logic’s request for comment about the deepfake allegations or the government’s plans. Instead, the company sent an automatic reply that said “legacy media lies.”  

Getting that legislation through the House may also be a challenge, despite cross-party support for limiting deepfakes and other harmful images online. Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner tabled a private members bill in June to impose on platforms a duty of care for children, but criticized previous Liberal plans to create a regulating body, similar to the one now investigating X in the U.K. 

“As Canada pursues a new trade deal with the United States, pushing the same approach as the Brits… on this issue may have negative consequences for Canadians well beyond the obvious infringements upon their civil liberties,” Rempel Garner wrote on X at the time. “Online protections are needed and warranted, but, putting it mildly, an expensive and ubiquitous regulator with unfettered powers to expand its scope and to police all manner of speech may not be the winner that initial proponents of Ofcom and its proposed Canadian equivalent thought it would be.”

Even on a good day, the legislative process in Canada moves slowly, said Michael Geist, University of Ottawa’s internet and e-commerce law Canada Research Chair. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, he said, given the flaws with the government’s previous ill-fated attempts to regulate online harms.

“It’s a good thing to ensure that you’ve got detailed study and that stakeholders can pick apart proposed legislation and identify some of the risks associated with it and try to fix them,” he said. A more comprehensive approach may ensure the legislation remains relevant in the long term, even as technology evolves, Geist added. 

That’s not terribly satisfying for people in the short term, though, he said, “where they see an immediate harm and would like to see some sort of solution.”