08 August 2024 , 15:46
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X owner deletes post sharing faked Telegraph article that claimed convicted rioters would be sent to detention camps
Elon Musk shared a fake Telegraph article claiming Keir Starmer was considering sending far-right rioters to “emergency detainment camps” in the Falklands.
Musk deleted his post after about 30 minutes but a screenshot captured by Politics.co.uk suggests it had garnered nearly two million views before it was deleted.
In it, Musk shared the image posted by the co-leader of the far-right group Britain First, Ashlea Simon, which she captioned with, “we’re all being deported to the Falklands”.
The fake piece, purportedly written by a senior news reporter for the Telegraph and mocked up in the newspaper’s style, 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 said on Thursday it had never published the article in question. In a statement, a spokesperson for the Telegraph Media Group said: “This is a fabricated headline for an article that does not exist. We notified relevant platforms and requested that the post be taken down.”
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 criticising the UK government and law enforcement authorities’ responses to the riots.
The Guardian contacted X for comment but received an auto-response saying: “Busy now, please check back later.”
On Thursday, Musk shared a Sky News interview in which Stephen Parkinson, the director of public prosecutions in England and Wales, said police officers were scouring social media for material inciting racial hatred. “This is actually happening,” Musk said. In a separate post referring to the same clip, Musk called Parkinson “The Woke Stasi”.
Musk has been embroiled in a row with Keir Starmer and British enforcement authorities 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”.
The prime minister’s spokesperson said this week that there was “no justification” for those comments. In response, Musk has repeatedly targeted Starmer on his platform, including by branding him “two-tier Keir”.
Musk, who is the billionaire co-founder of Tesla, SpaceX and a payment platform called X.com that later became PayPal, bought Twitter in 2022 for $44bn. He rebranded it as X last year. There has been a string of controversies about the direction the platform has taken under his leadership, including accusations that he is not serious enough about removing harmful content.
The 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.
This week, Musk announced he was suing a group of advertisers and major companies, claiming they had unlawfully agreed not to advertise on X.