August 8, 2024 – 7:46 PM
Elon Musk reposted a post containing a fake Telegraph article on his X page on Thursday, The Guardian writes. According to the headline of the joint article, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is considering sending far-right protesters involved in the Southport riots to detention camps on the Falkland Islands. Musk went on to share an image posted by Ashlea Simon, co-leader of the far-right group Britain First, to which Simon commented: “We’re all being deported to the Falklands.”
The Guardian reported that Musk deleted the post half an hour after publishing it. politics.co.uk Before deleting the post, he took a screenshot of it: it shows that the post had nearly 2,000 views at the time.
The Telegraph denied in a statement on Thursday that it had published the article in question. The paper’s editors also reacted in their own X entry: In this they write,
“We have learned of the image circulating on X website which purports to be an article in The Telegraph about ‘emergency concentration camps’. The Telegraph has never published such an article.”
Elon Musk has since not apologized for sharing the hoax, and instead has continued to criticize the UK government and its response to the riots in his X posts.
This isn’t the first time X’s owner has spread misinformation on his own front: he recently shared a fake video of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. In the AI-generated video, Harris says Biden has dementia and doesn’t know how to run a country. In fact, she even states that she represents true diversity and is a winning card, because she is female and black.
