UK lawmakers plan to ask Elon Musk to give evidence on summer riots
They are looking into how social media companies and search engines encourage the spread of harmful and false content online
A PANEL of British lawmakers plans to invite Elon Musk to testify in parliament about X’s role in spreading disinformation during the UK’s summer riots.
Musk, who owns X and is an active user of the platform, will be asked to provide evidence to the House of Commons’ Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, said a person familiar with the matter.
The panel has been probing the role the social media platform played during the violent unrest.
“The violence we saw on UK streets this summer has shown the dangerous real-world impact of spreading misinformation and disinformation across social media,” committee chair Chi Onwurah, a member of the governing Labour Party, said on Wednesday (Nov 20).
“This is an important opportunity to investigate the extent to which social media companies and search engines encourage the spread of harmful and false content online.”
The murder of three girls in Southport on Jul 29 had sparked the riots – during which hostels housing immigrants were targeted – after false information spread online that the perpetrator was a Muslim asylum seeker. Hostels housing immigrants were targeted during the unrest.
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The invitation from the cross-party group of members of parliament comes at a sensitive moment in UK-US relations, with Musk set to take up a key role in the administration that President-elect Donald Trump will install in January.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been seeking to steady relations with Trump, after the President-elect’s legal team accused the premier’s Labour Party of interference in the US presidential campaign and illegal foreign campaign contributions to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ campaign.
Musk has also taken repeated potshots against Starmer’s government in posts on X, including during the riots.
Musk himself weighed in during the violence, and his comment on X that “civil war is inevitable” was dismissed as “unjustified” by 10 Downing Street.
He has since made numerous posts criticising the treatment of those charged for their online activity in connection with the violence. He also agreed with a statement by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage – a populist ally of Trump – that Starmer “poses the biggest threat to free speech we’ve seen in our history”.
All of that has made it unlikely Musk would accept an invitation to testify to Onwurah’s panel. The lawmakers could, if they choose, then resort to a much more rarely-used summons to bring him before them.
People served with such a summons in recent years include back-room Brexit architect Dominic Cummings – who went on to serve as a top aide to former prime minister Boris Johnson, in 2018, and the media mogul Rupert Murdoch in 2011.
The panel also plans to call in senior executives from Meta and TikTok to answer questions from members of parliament about the consequences of generative artificial intelligence, which was used in widely-shared images posted on Facebook and X inciting people to join the summer protests.
“We’ll examine how these companies use algorithms to rank content, and whether their business models encourage the spread of content that can mislead and harm us,” Onwurah said.
“We’ll look at how effective the UK’s regulations and legislation are in combating content like this – weighing up the balance with freedom of speech – and at who is accountable.”
Onwurah told The Guardian that because Musk has “very strong views on multiple aspects of this”, she would like the opportunity to see “how he reconciles his promotion of freedom of expression with his promotion of pure disinformation”. BLOOMBERG
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