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As Elon Musk reignites a British scandal involving gangs of men who sexually groomed underage girls, there is increasing evidence he is distorting the algorithm of his social media platform to advance his own political views. By Elle Hardy.
Is Musk tweaking X’s algorithm to push right-wing conspiracies?
As the new year rolled over, Elon Musk began posting repeatedly about cases of sexual abuse in the United Kingdom. In particular, he was interested in accounts of historic trafficking that became known as the “grooming gangs” scandal.
Musk’s posts have included accusing British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other prominent Labour politicians of engaging in a cover-up.
The “grooming gangs” scandal occurred in a number of northern English towns from the late 1980s to the early 2010s. The issue is particularly combustible, as an inquiry into the most prominent case, which took place in the town of Rotherham, found the perpetrators were predominantly English men of Pakistani heritage, while their victims were largely white and non-Muslim.
When the story was broken by journalist Andrew Norfolk in The Times in 2011, it was particularly damning about the “culture of silence” from authorities who failed to protect victims and address the scale of the problem.
A 2014 inquiry into the Rotherham abuse ring, led by Professor Alexis Jay, came to the “conservative” estimate that 1400 underage girls, some as young as 11, had been raped, trafficked and intimidated by the men between 1997 and 2013. She also found that authorities were reluctant to engage with the local community about the crimes for fear of stoking racial tensions.
Jay led a subsequent national inquiry into child sexual abuse between 2015 and 2022, finding child abuse was “endemic” and permeated all sections of British society. Her recommendations have yet to be enacted, although last week the Starmer government proposed sweeping child protection legislation based on the inquiry’s findings.
Musk’s interest in the grooming scandal appears to have been aroused after Labour minister Jess Phillips rejected a request from the local government in Oldham for a national inquiry into child sexual exploitation in the region in the 2000s and 2010s.
The issue was seized on by right-wing news station GB News, which claimed the Starmer government had failed to protect the victims by refusing to launch an inquiry. Oldham Council has since said it is in the process of setting up its own.
In the week following the GB News story, the Financial Times reported that Musk had posted about British politics more than 1180 times in seven days. Along the way, he has become a champion for the cause of jailed far-right protest leader Tommy Robinson.
Born Stephen Yaxley-Lennon in 1982, and raised in the multicultural town of Luton, north of London, Robinson came to national attention in 2009 as a founder of street protest movement the English Defence League. Yaxley-Lennon took on the pseudonym Tommy Robinson, a prominent football hooligan in the area, to conceal his identity and criminal history.
Dr Elizabeth Pearson, a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of London and author of Extreme Britain, says Robinson “mobilised around the idea that Islam is not compatible with Western democracy and culture”. She says his protest movement “described themselves as standing up for the white working class”.
Part of Robinson’s appeal lies in the idea there is a “two-tier system in the UK around both policing and freedom of expression”, Pearson says. Establishment figures such as former prime minister Boris Johnson are perceived as being able to get away with making highly inflammatory, Islamophobic remarks, but “not people of a certain class, like Tommy Robinson – and there is some truth in that”.
Pearson describes Robinson as having a “manic” energy. He has admitted he uses the threat of violence to compensate for his short physical stature. “Robinson is a charismatic person,” she says, “and he was able to bring a lot of people, particularly from a football hooliganism background, into this street movement that has never been a political party or had a membership list.”
Robinson and the English Defence League took up the grooming issue with particular vigour, which Pearson says is about using a women’s rights narrative to promote anti-Islamic views. After leaving the EDL in 2013, Robinson’s influence waned. He was jailed for fraud and contempt of court, banned from social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, and faced allegations of misappropriating donations.
That was, until his X account was reinstated by Elon Musk in November 2023. “Tommy Robinson was talking on his website about the need for an EDL 2.0, and soon after, Musk had allowed him back on the platform,” Pearson says. “It did not seem like a coincidence that it was just in time for him to organise an Armistice Day protest, which is a hugely important day in far-right circles.”
In August, Britain was rocked by violent anti-immigration protests that led to 796 people being charged. At least one protest was believed to have been organised by supporters of the English Defence League, with protesters chanting Tommy Robinson’s name. “The riots showed that social media is not harmless, that it can create and stoke violence,” Pearson says. “Musk has found a scab in British society, and he is picking at it until it bleeds.”
As part of his newfound interest in the British grooming scandal, Musk has taken up Robinson’s cause, pinning the message “Free Tommy Robinson” to the top of his own X account for a period and asking his more than 211 million followers, “Why is Tommy Robinson in a solitary confinement prison for telling the truth?”
Robinson is serving an 18-month jail sentence for contempt of court, after repeating false and defamatory claims against a teenage Syrian refugee. Musk is deliberately conflating this unrelated charge with the grooming scandal. He has posted that Robinson should be “freed and those who covered up this travesty should take his place in that cell”.
Musk’s intervention was condemned by his ally and Reform UK party founder Nigel Farage, who says Robinson is “not right for Reform”. Following the comments, Musk, who has recently hinted at a large donation to Reform UK, posted that Farage “doesn’t have what it takes” to lead the party.
The billionaire saved most of his invective for Starmer, however, who was Director of Public Prosecutions between 2008 and 2013, when the agency declined to prosecute at least one grooming gang case after finding the main victim “unreliable”.
Musk accused Starmer of being “deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes”. He has said the British prime minister should go to prison and even suggested “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government”.
Musk’s embrace of extreme-right politics appears to have accelerated since his US$44 billion purchase of Twitter, now X, in October 2022. Journalist Jacob Silverman, author of the forthcoming book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, says under Musk’s leadership the platform “has become more of an overtly right-wing echo chamber”.
Before acquiring Twitter, Musk had developed an online persona as a “memelord” who posted ironic jokes, but today he appears more interested in using the platform to further his real-world political aims.
On taking over the platform, Musk said he would implement a policy of “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach”. Silverman says that over the past two years, the site has been “algorithmically filtered” to “be more right-wing and more reflective” of both Musk and his interests, as well as boosting “blue check” subscribers.
Silverman says the grooming scandal appears to have been “distorted and amplified” by this ecosystem. He says Musk’s use of X means he can “just wake up and decide, where am I going to provoke a panic today?”
Musk’s political interests can be difficult to separate from his significant business interests, including Starlink contracts in Ukraine and large factories in the United States, Germany and China. “Sometimes those things might be connected to real interests,” Silverman says. “But sometimes I think it’s just him having fun, being trollish, or trying to distract from other issues.
“Whenever his attention alights on something, whether it’s true or false, but especially when it’s sensational, then suddenly there’s this swell of attention around it,” Silverman says. “He’s the richest man in the world and he creates his own centre of gravity.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 11, 2025 as "Musk right boon".
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