Late last week, Jonathan Freedland, one of Britain’s leading political commentators, wrote an article in The Guardian He described billionaire Elon Musk as a cheerleader for the pogrom-like riots against immigrants that were sweeping the country at the time. “He is surely the most significant figure on the global far right,” Freedland wrote of Musk, “and he possesses the world’s biggest megaphone. As he might put it, a battle to defeat him is now inevitable – and it must be won.”

A few days later, Bruce Daisley, Twitter’s former vice president for Europe, called for Musk to be charged with incitement. He also called for faster implementation of the UK’s Online Safety Act of 2023, which aims to protect children online and set out a range of responsibilities for social media companies, and an update to the legislation to make it easier for the government to prosecute senior social media executives who either shirk their responsibility to curb the spread of misinformation or actively participate in this disinformation game. “The question before us,” Daisley recently wrote in The Guardian“is whether we are prepared to allow a billionaire oligarch to camp off the coast of Britain and shoot at our society.”

The flood of calls to denounce Musk’s outsized and destructive role in shaping public discourse was sparked by the business magnate’s relentless spread of misinformation following the gruesome murder of three young girls in the northern English town of Southport two weeks ago. Perhaps no social media platform or social media owner has done more to spread far-right lies about the events in Southport than Musk and his platform X.

In an intervention that was equally ignorant and reckless even by his own increasingly derogatory standards, Musk claimed that “civil war was inevitable” as far-right protests gained momentum following the Southport killings.

To be clear, there is no sense of impending civil war in Britain at the moment, and most communities in the country have remained absolutely peaceful over the past few weeks. Despite all the violence of the Troubles, Britain – which has not experienced a real civil war since the mid-17th century –^th A country in the 18th century that has no heavily armed civilian population and which has recently seen peaceful parliamentary elections and a peaceful transfer of power from one party to another is further removed from a fratricidal clash between rival armies than any other country on earth. It is no closer to civil war today than it was in the 1980s, when football hooligans terrorized the areas around stadiums after Saturday matches.

And although the far right managed to burn down a few buildings and terrify thousands of immigrants and asylum seekers this month, it was quickly overwhelmed by tens of thousands of peaceful anti-racism protesters and its violence was prosecuted. This is not to downplay the destructive impact of far-right groups, of course. Racist and fascist organizing efforts have a long history in Britain, from Oswald Mosley’s fascist marches in London’s East End in the 1930s, to the violent outbursts of the National Front in the 1970s, to far-right football hooligans a decade later. Yet every time the fascist fringe has tried to gain dominance on the streets, it has ultimately been successfully pushed back by a number of counter-protesters and a Popular Front-like opposition.

When Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office responded to Musk’s bizarre civil war post with a rather watered-down statement saying there was “no justification” for such a statement, the X holder began a rhetorical war with the newly elected leader. He accused the British police of implementing a two-tier policing system that treats the far right more harshly than Muslims and other groups; he posted that Starmer should be concerned about “attacks on all communities,” as if the far-right rioters themselves were somehow victims; and he shared videos purporting to show a British citizen being arrested for an online post comparing the UK under Starmer to the Soviet Union. It is true that there are laws against racist online hate speech in the UK, and some people have been arrested for their posts, but these posts do not generally express a hateful worldview; In the case of the two men who were recently sentenced to prison for their posts, they were actually advocating for arson attacks by rioting mobs on certain hotels where asylum seekers were housed. Only in Elon Musk’s world would calling for arson be considered acceptable free speech.

Musk’s destructive interventions didn’t stop there. He posted a fake news story in the middle of the night claiming that Starmer was about to authorize the opening of detention camps for far-right rioters in the Falkland Islands off the coast of Argentina. He then fueled the chaos with cryptic one-liners, such as a post at 5:50 a.m. on August 10: “It’s the year 2030 in the UK and you will be executed for posting a meme…”

Just to be clear, unlike the US, the UK does not have the death penalty. And unlike the US – where mobs with high-velocity rifles often intimidate their political opponents, librarians, public health workers and others they consider “enemies of the people”, and where a growing number of political figures are calling for the imprisonment, deportation or execution of their enemies – high-profile calls for bloodshed are rare in the UK, especially from senior government officials.

All of this begs the question: Does the richest man in the world have nothing better to do before his first cup of morning coffee than to write inane, false and inflammatory posts aimed at stoking fear and hatred in a country that has just experienced a traumatic week of far-right violence? If Musk had even a modicum of decency, he would be examining the role his own platform may have played in fuelling the wave of hate by amplifying the reach of figures such as Tommy Robinson, the founder of the fascist English Defense League, whom Musk gave a new platform after buying Twitter in 2022. Once something of an iconoclast, Musk has become an outspoken champion of the far-right worldview in recent years.

How will the British government respond to this attack by the world’s most damaging – and powerful and wealthy – online troll?

Under the previous Conservative government, Musk was given free rein, despite his increasingly erratic statements and his use of the X to stoke far-right movements around the world. In fact, just months before the general election in July, then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak met with Musk for a live-streamed one-on-one conversation.

Now, however, there are growing calls to use the UK legal system to rein in X and its billionaire owner. Some are arguing for restricting access to X in the UK, but this has found no resonance in government circles. More likely, British social media users feeling alienated by X’s shift to the right will increasingly use their power as consumers to look elsewhere; indeed, Bluesky, an alternative to X, has seen a surge in usage in the UK following Musk’s intervention in UK politics. Meanwhile, Starmer has warned social media managers that if companies incite racist mobs online, they are allowing crimes to be committed “on your premises”. The subtext was that the government was – or at least could, if push came to shove – prepared to potentially prosecute companies and their executives if they did not effectively police their own sites.

Regardless of whether the British government ultimately decides to prosecute Musk, a Rubicon appears to have been crossed in the past week. One of the richest and most powerful men in the world has used his social media reach to intensify the chaos in a country that has been ravaged by far-right violence for days. Freedland is right: now is the time to hold Musk and his terrible brand of politics to account.