According to a British analyst, Elon Musk poses a greater disinformation threat to the UK than Russia. A House of Commons committee was informed by Vera Tolz-Zilitinkevic, a Russian professor at the University of Manchester, that the social media owner’s “potential influence in the UK is greater than that of Russia.”
Blair McDougall, a Scottish Labour MP, asked Tolz-Zilitinkevic a question at the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. McDougall said, “People like Musk are now using their power and their platform to try to take control our politics and distract us” from challenging the ultra-wealthy, media reported.
When inquired by East Renfrewshire MP McDougall how X owner Musk compared to states as a threat of disinformation, Tolz-Zilitinkevic said:
“When we talk about risk to states, either from individual actors or these organized influence campaigns, I think there’s a huge distinction between… if we take operations from Russia specifically to established Western democracies such as the UK or US internally, the influence on the population, the threat, is not great.”
The impact of Kremlin-affiliated actors and Russian state actors on the US or the UK is significantly less than that of democratic actors, she added.
“Musk’s potential influence in the UK is greater than that of Russia,” Vera Tolz-Zilitinkevic said.
Following a barrage of posts on his social media platform X, Musk dominated UK news for the first week of the year. The billionaire entrepreneur said that Labour minister Jess Phillips “deserves to be in prison” and referred to her as a “rape genocide apologist” for turning down calls for the Home Office to spearhead a public investigation into child sexual exploitation in Oldham.
In another post, Musk wrote, “Prison for Starmer,” and implied that Prime Minister Keir Starmer was “complicit in the crimes” of child sex abusers.
In reference to his treatment of gang grooming while in power, he charged former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown with having “committed an unforgivable crime against the British people” and “sold those little girls for votes.”
McDougall asserts that we “don’t want Musk’s style of politics in the UK” and that wealthy foreigners “won’t manipulate the country.”
“A tiny number of people have become unimaginably rich and powerful over the last decade, while the rest of us struggled,” he told the Record.
“They know that the system they built of insecure work, crumbling public services, and hollowed-out communities has made people desperate for change and for more control over our lives. That threatens their power and their wealth, so people like Musk are now using their power and their platform to try to take control of our politics and distract us from that broken system.
“But we’re smarter than they give us credit for. We won’t be manipulated by rich foreigners. We’ve seen what Musk’s style of politics leads to in Washington, and we don’t want it here in the UK.”
