Elon Musk, known as Chief Troll Officer for his social media platform X, has been tweeting about British politics, grooming gangs, and child sexual abuse 48 times since the start of the year.
Keir Starmer, who indirectly accused Musk of spreading “lies and misinformation” about grooming in the UK, responded to Musk’s tweets at a press conference meant to launch NHS reforms.
Musk’s obsession with the UK can be grouped under three headings:
Self-interest;
Self-aggrandisement,
Self-deception.
Self-interest may be irritated by Britain’s Online Safety Act, which allows Ofcom to fine social media companies up to 10 percent of global turnover if they fail to police content inciting violence or terrorism. Musk views this sanction as criminalizing free speech.
Self-aggrandisement involves Musk praising a populist Canadian politician and promising to live-stream a conversation with Alice Weidel, a far-right candidate for the German chancellorship.
Self-deception involves Musk succumbing to a potent form of confirmation bias, absorbing false information fed to him by an algorithm tuned to his instruction to favour inflammatory posts on X regardless of their veracity, recycling this information with crude exaggeration for 210 million followers, and garnishing it with an odd mixture of baseless accusations and bad jokes.
In response to calls for a new grooming inquiry, he later added: “Starmer was deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes. That’s what the inquiry would show.” He also tweeted a poll yesterday on whether “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.”
A 2022 report on child sex abuse in Telford found police were “nervous” on account of the mainly Asian suspects’ race, but there is no evidence Starmer resisted prosecutions out of “political correctness” or fear the far-right would exploit them.
As Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013, Starmer worked with then-chief prosecutor Nazir Afzal to bring a landmark 2012 prosecution against a grooming gang of British Pakistani men in Rochdale.
In 2011, a Times investigation counted 14 grooming gang prosecutions in the previous three years, while in 2022, an independent inquiry into child sexual exploitation by Professor Alexis Jay counted 35 child grooming-related convictions in Starmer’s last three years as DPP.
Kemi Badenoch, the new Conservative leader, has called for a new national inquiry into grooming gangs, while Starmer and Jess Phillips, his safeguarding minister, have rejected calls for a fresh inquiry on the basis that the Jay report was comprehensive and what’s needed now is action. Keir Starmer even now saying Musk has “crossed a line” by targeting Jess Philips as one of his cabinet colleagues.