Turns out, even the owners of social networks aren’t immune from misinformation that can be propagated on the site. Case in point: Elon Musk and X.
On Thursday, Elon Musk retweeted a fake headline from the Telegraph claiming British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was considering building “emergency detainment camps” on South America’s Falkland Islands, a British overseas territory, to hold prisoners from the wave of riots sweeping the country fueled by anti-immigration sentiment.
Elon Musk has apparently deleted a post sharing an article 'screenshot' purporting to be a Telegraph article headlined: "Keir Starmer considering building 'emergency detainment camps' on the Falkland Islands." The Telegraph says "no such article" has ever been published by it. https://t.co/V63ZfU9De3
— Press Gazette (@pressgazette) August 8, 2024
Musk, who initially commented “‘Detainment Camps’…” under the headline, deleted the post less than an hour after publishing it, but not before it was viewed by nearly 2 million users on the platform, according to screenshots by a journalist in the U.K.
Just Elon Musk quote tweeting the co-leader of far-right party, Britain First, who is sharing a fake Telegraph headline
— Josh Self (@Josh_Self_) August 8, 2024
Seen by almost 1 million people in 15 minutes
Utterly dystopian pic.twitter.com/4W5ZOssbEY
The initial post Musk retweeted came from Ashlea Simon, chair of the U.K.’s far-right political party Britain First, which has made headlines for protesting outside the hotel rooms of asylum seekers. Simon, too, has since deleted the fake Telegraph headline.
Musk had already entangled himself in Britain’s domestic political crisis. On Aug. 4, he shared another post showing video footage of the riots brought on by the killing of three children in Northern England. False rumors circulated by far-right groups claimed the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker.
Civil war is inevitable
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 4, 2024
The post Musk retweeted claims the chaos in the video is “the effects of mass migration and open borders,” and Musk commented that “civil war is inevitable,” which prompted condemnation from the prime minister’s office.
In the U.S., Musk has also garnered criticism for posts shared on X relating to the current presidential election, often on matters of immigration as well. According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit watchdog group based in London and Washington, D.C., Musk has “posted false or misleading claims about the Democrats ‘importing voters’ on 42 occasions, amassing 747 million views.”
“The lack of Community Notes [user-generated fact-checks] on these posts shows that his business is failing woefully to contain the kind of algorithmically-boosted incitement that we all know can lead to real-world violence,” the center’s CEO, Imran Ahmed, said in a recent press release.