Someone should look into that |
On the heels of violent demonstrations across Britain over the past several weeks, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a far-right activist more commonly known as Tommy Robinson, started tweeting at Elon Musk.
“If it wasn't for Elon Musk,” Yaxley-Lennon wrote on Aug. 6, then the “government and legacy media would've had me hung, drawn and quartered,” he wrote theatrically. Musk had restored the anti-Islam campaigner’s account the previous November and was now giving credence to his xenophobic rhetoric. It was the first of four effusive posts from the right-wing activist cheering on the billionaire’s controversial interventions into British politics.
Musk’s incursions into US politics are well documented, capped this week by his technically glitchy but overwhelmingly friendly two-hour interview of Donald Trump, whom he endorsed in July. Yet Yaxley-Lennon’s posts demonstrate that Musk’s influence extends far beyond the contours of the US. As the UK riots unfolded, Musk’s social network was used to spread misinformation, while Musk himself fanned the flames.
Even before protestors took to the streets in the UK, the billionaire was responding to a broad array of right-wing European agitators, including Dutch anti-climate activists, Austrian ethnonationalists and an (anonymous) anti-immigrant campaigner from Italy known for spreading dubious claims about various minority groups. And when I say responding, I don’t mean he was doing the good work of fact-checking them.
Musk’s actions have lent weight and considerable attention to fringe ideologies, which would have once struggled to gain purchase in Europe’s more staid political traditions. With 194 million followers on X, anything Musk engages with will find a much larger audience than it would otherwise get.
One beneficiary of this attention has been anti-immigrant campaigner, Radio Genoa, who established his account in August 2021, and was a popular voice by the time he caught Musk’s attention in September 2023. “Who in the government is pushing this mad policy?” Genoa wrote in response to a video purporting to show an NGO-owned boat carrying migrants rescued from the Mediterranean. That post would be the start of a long online relationship with Musk; the billionaire responded to Genoa at least fourteen times over the next few months.
Among his most recent posts, Genoa misgendered Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and posted a video of a woman being repeatedly struck by a man.
As America’s self-appointed chief culture warrior, Musk is starting to get pushback. After showing support for the assertion that newly elected UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer represents a threat to free speech, he got a rebuke from a spokesperson for the British leader. And in the buildup to his conversation with Trump on X this week, the EU published a lengthy letter saying that officials will be “keeping an eye out” for violations of the Digital Services Act.
Even a former Twitter executive is worried about Musk’s increasing involvement in European politics. “Musk might force his angry tweets to the top of your timeline, but the will of a democratically elected government should mean more than the fury of a tech oligarch,” wrote Bruce Daisley, a former VP for the platform, recently in an op-ed for the Guardian. Daisley and others advocate for legislation to curb the spread of incitement online.
As late as Sunday, Musk was still continuing to comment on how “messed up” it was that participants in the recent far-right UK riots were being prosecuted. There are some voices that believe he should be among them.—Daniel Zuidijk