Elon Musk shared a fake Telegraph article claiming Keir Starmer was considering sending far-right rioters to “emergency detention camps” in the Falklands.
Musk deleted his post after about 30 minutes, but A screenshot taken by Politics.co.uk suggests it had garnered nearly two million views before it was removed.
In it, Musk shared the image posted by the co-leader of the far-right group Britain First, Ashlea Simon, which she captioned: “we’re all being deported to the Falklands.”
The fake article, purportedly written by a senior Telegraph journalist and presented in the newspaper’s style, said the camps in the Falklands “would be used to detain prisoners from the ongoing riots as Britain’s prison system is already stretched to capacity.”
The Telegraph said on Thursday that it had never published the article in question. In a statement, a spokesperson for Telegraph Media Group said: “This is a fabricated headline for an article that does not exist. We have notified the relevant platforms and requested that the post be removed.”
In an article published in X, the paper claimed that it was “aware of an image circulating on X purporting to be a Telegraph article about ‘emergency detention camps’. The Telegraph has never published such an article before.”
Musk has not apologized for sharing the false report, but has continued to share material criticizing the UK government and law enforcement responses to the riots.
The Guardian contacted X for comment but received an automated reply saying: “Busy now, please check back later.”
On Thursday, Musk shared a Sky News interview In an article published by Stephen Parkinson, the Director of Public Prosecutions in England and Wales, who said police officers were searching social media for material inciting racial hatred, Musk said: “This is actually happening.” In a separate post referencing the same clipMusk called Parkinson’s “the awakened Stasi.”
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Musk has been embroiled in a dispute with Keir Starmer and British law enforcement authorities since claiming in response to 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 spokesman said this week that there was “no justification” for those comments. In response, Musk has repeatedly attacked Starmer on his platform, including calling him a “two-tier Keir”.
Musk, the billionaire co-founder of Tesla, SpaceX and a payments platform called X.com that later became PayPal, bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion. He rebranded it as X last year. There have been a number of controversies over the direction the platform has taken under his leadership, including accusations that it doesn’t take removing harmful content seriously enough.
The Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital NHS Trust said in a post on Thursday that it was closing its X account after 13 years because the platform is “no longer consistent with the values of our Trust.” It directed followers to Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
This week, Musk announced that he was suing a group of advertisers and major companies, alleging that they had illegally agreed not to advertise on X.