New Zealand Parliament to Cease Posting on X, Cites Concerns With AI ‘Nudification’

Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters claims ’moral virtue signalling' is behind the move, and that the Parliament’s Clerk has overstepped his authority.

The logo of social network X displayed on a smartphone in Brussels on Sept. 27, 2024. Nicolas Tucat/AFP via Getty Images

A decision by the New Zealand Parliament’s Clerk of the House David Wilson to cease posting official updates on X has drawn criticism.

The Clerk is responsible for functions such as providing Hansard (the formal written record of proceedings) and preparing the Order Paper, but under the role of “parliamentary engagement,” he’s also in charge of the website and communications.

That includes a commitment to “making Parliament more accessible” so that more citizens will engage with the process.

New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters called the decision “moral virtue signalling,” which he went on to define as “where someone seeks to do one thing but causes damage to other freedoms.”

“Why has such a significant and serious decision been made without consulting parliament?” he asked, adding that “neither the Clerk nor the Speaker’s Office are the moral compass for 123 MPs let alone 5.3 million New Zealanders.”

The country’s Free Speech Union also criticised the move, saying Parliament had an obligation to open government and to ensure accessibility, especially in an election year.

“Parliament doesn’t belong to Parliamentary Service,” the Union said. “It belongs to the public. You don’t get to decide 933,000 Kiwis don’t matter because you dislike the platform. When Parliament leaves, the authoritative information disappears. The users don’t.”

The union’s chief executive, Jillianne Heather, has written to Speaker Gerry Brownlee, noting what it calls “a pattern of selective withdrawal” from the platform after the Labour Party stopped posting in May of last year and the Green Party ceased in November the year before.

Only the National and New Zealand First party maintain a presence.

Parliament’s posts generally reflect the nature of the Clerk’s other functions, alerting readers to the availability of that day’s questions to ministers, or reminding the public that they can book guided tours of the parliamentary complex.

They receive few comments, but the reaction to the decision suggests they’re widely read by people who follow politics.

The announcement by the New Zealand Parliament that it would no longer be posting updates to the X social media platform. NZ Parliament / X.com

Since December, the highest engagement was seven comments—all likely made by bots—on an announcement that the Judicature (Timeliness) Legislation Amendment Act 2025 had been signed into law. But that same post had been read 1,400 times, and no post had fewer than a thousand views.

In contrast, at the time of writing, the announcement that Parliament would no longer be posting had attracted 105 likes, 284 reposts and 33 comments, all of them negative, and all but one hidden by whoever operates the account.

The decision has been applauded by some in the media, which have lately produced opinion pieces aimed at the platform’s artificial intelligence, Grok, and its apparent ability to remove clothing from images and replace them with bikinis, with one commentator writing, “every official tweet is a nod to child abuse.”

Asked by reporters to justify his decision, Wilson said he'd withdrawn Parliament’s X presence because of “the news I had seen about the way ... Grok can be used to generate deepfake nudes and child exploitation material. It didn’t feel right for my organisation to use a platform that allowed that to happen, and didn’t seem to be doing anything about it.”

Meanwhile, the manager of government business in the House, Chris Bishop, posted a terse “wrong decision in my view” and committed to raising the matter with Parliament’s Business Committee, which could potentially overturn the decision.

The legislatures of the United States, the European Union, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom all maintain a presence on Elon Musk’s site. Despite several users tagging him in their comments on the issue, Musk has yet to react to Wilson’s decision.