As asylum centres are locked down ahead of another expected day of violent protests across the UK on Wednesday, X owner Elon Musk has stoked tensions by labelling UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer “#TwoTierKier” and spreading a far-right conspiracy theory claiming white rioters are being treated more harshly by police than minorities.
For days, Musk has tried to use his enormous influence to suggest that diversity was causing the unrest: “If you put incompatible cultures together without assimilation, conflict is inevitable.” Musk wrote. In response to a video of riots in Liverpool on Monday, Musk warned:“Civil war is inevitable.”
Six thousand Police officers are on standby in response to far-right figures who shared a list of dozens of targets, including locations of asylum centers and law offices that assist asylum seekers. Officials are facing resistance from X to remove posts deemed a threat to national security, according to a Financial Times report.
After death of three children in Southport during a mass stabbing attack Last week, in the wake of the riots, conspiracies flooded social media platforms, including X. But it was on Telegram where much of the initial organizing for the attacks took place.
Far-right channels not only posted information about protest locations and times, but also shared information on how to build Molotov cocktails and how to set buildings on fire, according to a WIRED review of multiple Telegram channels.
But while Musk and X have done little to quell their activity, Telegram appears to have taken action against at least one channel that has been created to spread hate and misinformation surrounding the Southport stabbings.
The Telegram channel “Southport Wake Up” was created within hours of last week’s stabbing incident and quickly amassed a large following. It shared details about local protests but quickly began issuing violent threats against identified people and locations.
On Monday evening, Telegram apparently removed the channel, which at the time had nearly 15,000 members. It is unclear whether Telegram made this decision on its own or whether it was ordered by UK authorities.
The channel’s creator, who has been reported to the police by investigators but whose name has not been revealed publicly, has tried to create new channels several times, but all of them have been closed within a few hours of their creation.
Telegram told WIRED that its moderators were “actively monitoring the situation and are removing channels and posts that contain calls for violence.”
A spokesperson told WIRED that the Home Office could not comment on whether it had asked for the Stockport Wakeup telegram channel to be blocked, as “it is an operational issue”.
Many far-right figures had migrated to Telegram in recent years after being banned from all other platforms due to Telegram’s notorious laxity on censorship. But since Musk took control of Twitter in November 2022, many of those previously exiled extremists have been welcomed back, including Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the leader of the now-defunct English Defence League (EDL), who goes by the name Tommy Robinson.