Elon Musk Promotes Fake News About British Rioters
Elon Musk has used his uniquely powerful position as owner of the X / Twitter social media platform to share a fake news story which falsely claimed that the British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, was considering sending ant-immigrant rioters to “emergency detainment camps” in the distant Falkland Islands.
Musk's account on X is followed by 193 million people around the world. Realising the error, his post was deleted after 30 minutes, but not before it had nearly two million views.
In the article, Musk shared an image posted by a leader of the anti-immigration group, Britain First, which was captioned with, “we’re all being deported to the Falklands”. The fake article, purportedly written by a senior news reporter for the Telegraph newspaper and replicating the newspaper’s format, said camps in the Falklands “would be used to detain prisoners from the ongoing riots as the British prison system is already at capacity”.
The Telegraph has repudiated the fake report and in a post on X, the newspaper said it was aware of an image circulating on X which purports to be a Telegraph article about ‘emergency detainment camps’. No such article has ever been published by the Telegraph.
Musk has not apologised for sharing the fake report, but has continued to share material critical of the British government responses to the riots.
Musk has been engaged in a dispute with Prime Minister Starmer and British law enforcement since he claimed in response to the anti-immigration protests in England and Northern Ireland that “civil war is inevitable” and that the police response had been “one-sided”.
Musk, who is the billionaire founder of Tesla, SpaceX and the online payment platform PayPal, bought Twitter in 2022 for $44bn and rebranded it as X last year.
Under his ownership, there have been a succession of controversies, notably including accusations that he is not serious about removing harmful content.
- The British Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital NHS trust said in a post on Thursday that it was closing its account on X after 13 years because the platform is “no longer consistent with our Trust values”. It directed followers to Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
- X is suing a group of advertisers and major companies, accusing them of unlawfully agreeing to "boycott" the site. X claims they have deprived it of "billions of dollars" in revenue. It has filed a claim against the food giants Unilever and Mars, private healthcare company CVS Health, and renewable energy firm Orsted, along with a trade association called the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), in a Texas court.
Some companies had been increasingly cautious about advertising on the platform as concerns have risen that its owner is not serious enough about removing harmful online content and its advertising revenue has slumped since his involvement with the platform.
Politico | US District Court | Indpendent | BBC | AlJazeera | Times of India | Guardian
Image: Ideogram
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