UK Lawmakers Plan to Ask Musk to Give Evidence on Summer Riots

Ailbhe Rea
·3-min read

(Bloomberg) -- 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.

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Musk, who owns X and is an active user of the platform himself, will be asked to provide evidence to the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, according to a person familiar with the matter, who confirmed an earlier report from the Guardian newspaper. The panel is probing the role played in the violent unrest by misinformation, social media, and the algorithms that underpin it.

“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 in a statement on the panel’s website. “This is an important opportunity to investigate to what extent social media companies and search engines encourage the spread of harmful and false content online.”

The invitation from the cross-party group of MPs 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. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is seeking to steady relations with Trump after his legal team accused the premier’s Labour party of interference in the presidential campaign and illegal foreign campaign contributions to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ campaign. Moreover, Musk himself has taken repeated potshots against Starmer’s government in posts on X, including during the riots.

The riots — during which hostels housing immigrants were targeted — were sparked by the murder of three girls in Southport on July 29, after false information spread online that the perpetrator was a Muslim asylum-seeker.

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. Musk has since made numerous posts criticizing 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 make 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 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 AI, 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’d like the opportunity to see “how he reconciles his promotion of freedom of expression with his promotion of pure disinformation.”

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