How Elon Musk Stoked the Fire of the UK’s Far Right Anti-Immigrant Riots

Late last week, Jonathan Freedland, one of the U.K.’s top political commentators, wrote an article in The Guardian calling out billionaire Elon Musk as a cheerleader for the pogrom-like anti-immigrant riots then sweeping the country. “He is surely the global far right’s most significant figure,” Freedland wrote of Musk, “and he holds the world’s largest megaphone. As he may put it, a battle to defeat him is now inevitable — and it has to be won.”

A few days later, Bruce Daisley, a former Twitter vice president for Europe, called for Musk to be indicted for incitement. He also called for implementation of the U.K.’s Online Safety Act of 2023, which was designed to protect children while they are online and to detail a set of responsibilities for social media companies, to be rolled out faster, and for the legislation to be updated to make it easier for the government to prosecute top-tier social media executives who either skirt their responsibilities to tame the spread of misinformation or actively take part in that misinformation game. “The question we are presented with,” Daisley wrote recently in The Guardian, “is whether we’re willing to allow a billionaire oligarch to camp off the U.K. coastline and take potshots at our society.”

The outpouring of calls to tackle Musk’s outsized and destructive role in shaping popular discourse has been triggered by the business tycoon’s relentless spreading of misinformation in the wake of the horrific killing of three young girls in the Northern English town of Southport two weeks ago. Arguably, no social media platform, and no social media owner, has done more to facilitate the seeding of far right lies about the events in Southport than has Musk and his X platform.

In an intervention both blitheringly ignorant and reckless, even by his own increasingly debased standards, Musk suggested “Civil war is inevitable” as the far right protests gathered steam after the killings in Southport.

To be clear, there is no sense of imminent civil war in the U.K. at the moment, and the vast majority of communities around the country have stayed absolutely peaceful in recent weeks. In fact, for all of the violence of the rioting, the U.K. — which hasn’t had a genuine civil war since the mid-17^th century, which doesn’t have a heavily armed civil population and which recently saw a peaceful general election and a peaceful transfer of power from one party to the other — is about as far from a fratricidal clash of warring armies as any state on Earth. It is no closer to civil war today than it was in the 1980s when football hooligans terrorized areas around stadiums after Saturday games.

Moreover, while it did manage to burn a few buildings and instill terror in the hearts of thousands of immigrants and asylum seekers this month, the far right was rapidly overwhelmed by the turnout of tens of thousands of peaceful anti-racist protesters, and its violence prosecuted by the courts. That’s not, of course, to minimize the destructive impact of far right groups. Racist and fascist organizing efforts have a long history in the U.K., from Oswald Mosley’s fascist marches in the East End of London in the 1930s through to violent National Front outbursts in the 1970s, and far right football hooligans a decade later. Yet, each time the fascist fringe has made a bid for dominance on the streets, it has ultimately been successfully pushed back by an array of counter-protesters and popular front-styled opposition.

When Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office responded to Musk’s bizarre civil war post with a fairly milquetoast statement saying there was “no justification” for such a pronouncement, the X owner went to rhetorical war with the newly elected leader. He accused British police of instituting a two-tier policing system that treated the far right more harshly than Muslims and other groups; posted that Starmer should be concerned about “attacks on all communities,” as if the far right rioters were themselves somehow victims; and shared videos purporting to show a British resident being arrested for what they had posted online and comparing the U.K. under Starmer to the Soviet Union. It is true that the U.K. does have laws against online racial incitement, and has arrested a few people for their posts, but those posts aren’t generically expressing a hateful worldview; rather, in the case of the two men recently sentenced to jail terms for their posts, they were very specifically advocating arson attacks by the rampaging mobs on particular hotels housing asylum seekers. Only in Elon Musk’s world would advocating setting fire to people be deemed acceptable free speech.

Musk’s destructive interventions didn’t stop there. He followed up with a middle-of-the-night repost of a fake news story claiming Starmer was about to authorize the opening of detention camps for far right rioters on the Falkland Islands off the coast of Argentina. He then added to the mayhem with cryptic one-liners, such as the 5:50 am post on August 10: “It’s 2030 in the UK & you’re being executed for posting a meme…”

Just to clarify, unlike the U.S., there is no death penalty in the U.K. And unlike in the U.S. — where mobs with high velocity rifles often intimidate their political opponents, librarians, public health officials and others they deem to be “enemies of the people,” and where a growing number of political figures call for their enemies to be imprisoned, deported or executed — in the U.K., high-profile calls for bloodshed are rare, especially from senior government officials.

All of which begs the question: Doesn’t the world’s richest man have anything better to do before his first cup of coffee in the morning than author inane, false and inflammatory posts aimed at stirring up fear and hatred in a country that has just experienced a traumatic week of far right violence? If Musk had even a modicum of decency, he would explore the role that his own platform might have played in fomenting the hate spree by boosting the reach of figures such as Tommy Robinson, founder of the fascist English Defense League, whom Musk re-platformed after buying Twitter in 2022. Once something of an iconoclast, Musk has, over the past few years, become an unapologetic advocate of the far right worldview.

How will the U.K. government respond to this assault by the world’s most noxious — and powerful, and wealthy — online troll?

Under the previous Conservative government, Musk got a free pass, despite his increasingly erratic statements and his use of X to foment far right movements globally. Indeed, then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak sat down with Musk for a one-on-one live-streamed conversation just a few months before the July general election.

Now, however, calls are growing to use the U.K.’s legal system to rein in X and its billionaire owner. Some have argued for restricting access to X in the U.K., though this hasn’t picked up traction in government circles. More likely, U.K. social media users who are alienated by X’s far right drift will increasingly use their power as consumers to look elsewhere; indeed, in the wake of Musk’s intervention in U.K. politics, Bluesky, an alternative to X, saw a surge in usage in Britain. Meanwhile, Starmer has warned social media executives that when racist mobs are whipped up online, the companies are letting crimes be committed “on your premises.” The subtext was that the government would — or at least could, when push came to shove — be willing to potentially prosecute companies and their executives for not policing their own sites effectively.

Whether or not the U.K. government ultimately chooses to prosecute Musk, it seems a Rubicon has been crossed this past week. One of the world’s richest and most powerful men has used his social media reach to exacerbate chaos in a country battered by days of far right violence. Freedland is right: It has now become time to take on Musk and his awful brand of politics.