As asylum seekers’ centres are being placed under lockdown ahead of another day of violent protests set to take place across the UK on Wednesday, X owner Elon Musk has stoked tensions by calling British Prime Minister Keir Starmer “#TwoTierKier” and spreading a far-right conspiracy theory that white rioters are being treated more harshly by police than minorities.
For days, Musk has been trying to operate his enormous influence to suggest that diversity is the cause of the unrest: “If incompatible cultures are brought together without assimilation, conflict is inevitable” Musk wrote. In response to footage of the riots in Liverpool on Monday, Musk warned“Civil war is inevitable.”
Six thousand police are on standby in response to far-right figures sharing a list of dozens of targets, including the locations of asylum seeker shelters and lawyers’ offices that assist asylum seekers. Officials face resistance from X to remove posts that are deemed a threat to national security, according to Financial Times report.
After death Three children stabbed in Southport mass shooting last week, which sparked riots, conspiracies flooded social media platforms, including X. But it was on Telegram where most of the initial organizing of the attacks took place.
Far-right channels not only posted information about protest locations and times, but also shared information on how to construct Molotov cocktails and set buildings on fire, according to a review of multiple Telegram channels by WIRED.
But while Musk and X have done little to stop their actions, Telegram has apparently taken action against at least one channel that was created to spread hate and misinformation about the Southport stabbings.
The “Southport Wake Up” Telegram channel was created within hours of last week’s stabbing incident and quickly amassed a huge following. It shared details of local protests but quickly began threatening violence against the people and places mentioned.
On Monday evening, Telegram apparently removed the channel, which at that point had almost 15,000 members. It is unclear whether Telegram made the decision on its own or at the behest of authorities in the UK.
The creator of the channel, who was reported to police by investigators but whose name was not released, attempted to create fresh channels several times, but all were shut down within hours of being created.
Telegram told WIRED that its moderators are “actively monitoring the situation and removing channels and posts containing calls for violence.”
A spokesperson told WIRED that the Home Office could not comment on whether it had called for the Stockport Wakeup Telegram channel to be blocked because “it is an operational issue”.
Many far-right figures have migrated to Telegram in recent years after being banned from all other platforms due to Telegram’s notoriously lax approach to censorship. However, since Musk took over Twitter in November 2022, many of these 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 pseudonym Tommy Robinson.