cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/15910955
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”.
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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.
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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”.
Difficult to tell at this point.
There’s a lot of work being done on how such things bubble up and, with the arrest of the woman who’s tweet started the ball rolling we might get a better idea of this, but the experts on the BBC were suggesting that a lot of the early work by the far right takes place on Telegram and it then bubbles up onto more visible social media like Twitter (where it then gets boosted by bots, grifters, idiots and sundry bad faith actors). The fact that Musk retweeted the leader of Britain First, definitely suggests to me that this started on Telegram.