Elon Musk’s misinformation machine made the horrors of Southport much worse

The X owner’s commitment to free-speech absolutism contributed to a whirlwind of false reporting around the perpetrator’s identity, writes Alan Rusbridger. Why does he seem to care so little about the truth?

One of the first things Musk did when buying Twitter was to scrap or downsize the teams that tried, however ineffectively, to make it a place of decent and honest discourse (WireImage/Getty)

It’s unlikely that Elon Musk has ever heard of Southport, far less visited it. He has five or six companies to run, after all, and has been busy this week sounding off about Venezuela, Kamala Harris, puberty blockers, and why the legacy media lie to you.

So it’s probable that some ugly riots in a seaside town somewhere in northwest England will not have registered with the strange genius who may well be the richest man in the world.

And it’s equally probable that, if you told Musk that he was in some way responsible for these riots, 5,000 miles away from the seven homes he owns/owned in California, he would scoff.

But that’s how it is. When Musk decided to splash out $44bn (£35bn) to buy what was then called Twitter, he took ultimate responsibility for the speech of 350 million-odd users of the platform. And Twitter – now called X – is where a foul virus spread in the wake of the horrendous stabbings of numerous children in Southport on Monday. That virus led to the rioting the very next day – and since. And Musk enabled it.

There are two things you need to know about Musk before we delve into the events of those two days. The first is that he is as close to a free-speech absolutist as it’s possible to find. He may draw the line at illegal speech – if only because assorted law enforcement and regulatory authorities would have him – but otherwise, on X, anything goes. It can be hateful, inflammatory, racist and/or plain untrue, and he couldn’t care less.

One of the first things he did when buying Twitter was to scrap or downsize the teams that tried, however ineffectively, to make it a place of decent and honest discourse. Proven liars and conspiracy spreaders like Alex Jones were welcomed back with open arms.

The second is that Musk shares with his hero Donald Trump an utter disdain for what he sneeringly calls the legacy media. Only this week he reposted, to nearly 200 million followers, this, from David Sacks, another friend of Trump: “The biggest divide in the electorate is between people who get their information from independent media and those who are brainwashed by the MSM (mainstream media).” It was seen by 4 million people.

Musk, whatever else he is, is not a stupid man, so maybe one shouldn’t take him too literally when he proclaims Twitter to be a truth engine and the MSM a swill of lies. But I think it’s possible he is an unthinking and arrogant man who would simply shrug at what happened on his platform – and elsewhere – this week.

This is what happened: within hours of a local 17-year-old boy being arrested for the mass stabbings, untrue narratives started circulating on social media naming him as “Ali al-Shakati” – a Muslim migrant to the UK – alleging that he was on an MI6 watchlist, and that he was an asylum seeker who was known to the Liverpool mental health services.

None of this was true, but research by Dr Marc Owen Jones, an expert in digital authoritarianism, has traced how this kind of speculation rapidly notched up 27 million impressions on social media.

The self-proclaimed misogynist and alleged rapist Andrew Tate, who has nearly 10 million followers on X, posted a false image of the supposed attacker, claiming he was “straight off a boat” – even though by then the police had told us he had been born in Cardiff 17 years ago. But that, according to Tate, was a lie promoted by what he calls “the Matrix”.

One of the most prominent amplifiers of this untrue information was a shadowy organisation calling itself Channel3 Now. Quite who is behind this outfit is unclear. Investigative journalists soon found that it had started life as a place for Russian car rally videos. It may now be run from an address in Pakistan or the US. That’s the joy of Musk’s beloved “independent media” – you haven’t got a clue who half of the fabulists are.

The other half – the cleverer ones who merely insinuate, or metaphorically wink as they parrot myths or question the truth – are more familiar.

There’s our old friend Tommy Robinson, a racist thug calling himself a journalist, who has 800,000 followers on Musk’s platform. He seamlessly discussed the Southport stabbings in the context of Muslim violence. He has quite a following of other racist thugs who are only too willing to take to the streets. I think we can take it that Tommy knew what he was doing.

The former GB News presenter Laurence Fox, with half a million followers on Twitter, proclaimed: “Enough of this madness now. We need to permanently remove Islam from Great Britain.”

On his old channel, funded by the man who wants to own The Daily Telegraph, a presenter allowed a retired policeman to ramble on interminably on the basis that the attacker could be “a person of potentially Somali or East African heritage ... They think it’s a person of Muslim background, and so that needs to be managed.”

More smoothly, Reform leader Nigel Farage suggested – on a video rather than in the House of Commons – that we were not being told the truth, and questioned why the incident was not being treated as terror-related. The old Nigel dog whistle.

Within 24 hours, Jones was able to assemble and publish a map of the key accounts that had spread disinformation. If Musk cared, his team could have done the same. We are entitled to think he doesn’t care.

I don’t think he knows, or cares, that hundreds of rioters converged on a mosque in Southport on Tuesday night, injuring dozens of police officers. If you’re a free-speech absolutist, the consequences of what you allow on your platform are someone else’s problem.

Of course Musk wants Trump to be elected in November. The richest man in the world in league with the most powerful man in the world, both of them only too happy to see lies engulf truth. Because, once you don’t know who to believe, you will believe anything.

We’re in danger of sleepwalking back in time to the world dissected by Hannah Arendt six years after the Second World War: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie standards of thought) no longer exist.”

Meanwhile, in the UK, we are just recovering from a government whose core mission included weakening and undermining the BBC, which, for all its faults, is still clinging on as the most trusted – and universally available – purveyor of accurate information.

The stabbings in Southport this week were traumatic and horrific; it may be months before we’re able to establish a true and rounded picture of why they happened. At least we now know the true name of the suspect: Axel Rudakubana. But what happened afterwards was, in its own way, also horrifying. And Musk enabled it. Not that he knows or cares.