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Elon Musk’s X platform continues to be a breeding ground for violent anti-Muslim & anti-migrant hate, according to a new report from counter-hate researchers.
Analysis by the the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) – an organisation despised by far-right billionaire Musk – found that in the aftermath of the Southport murders last July, high-profile hate figures on social media platforms like Elon Musk’s X “falsely linked the attack to Muslims and migrants, leading to widespread disorder and violent riots across the UK.”
Now one year on from the 2024 riots following the Southport stabbings, new CCDH research finds that little has changed.
Research from the monitoring group found that “hateful influencers” garnered millions of views per day on X, with the platform “utterly failed to moderate this explosion of dangerous, violent content.”
CCDH’s findings led the UK’s online safety regulator Ofcom to conclude that there was a “clear connection” between posts on social media and the eruption of the 2024 riots.
Worryingly, the group finds that the “same forms of violent and murderous rhetoric that precipitated and inflamed the 2024 riots” are still widely circulating, with scant moderation by the platform.
The findings are likely to add further pressure on the Labour Government to act, and to review its heavy use of X.
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The research shows how posts from six far-right or extremist influencers – Tommy Robinson, Paul Golding, Ashlea Simon, Andrew Tate, Laurence Fox and Calvin Robinson – are the initial “parent” posts in an “intensely violent” series of replies from platform users.
Reply posts “encourage extreme acts of violence against Muslims and migrants: to shoot, to maim, and to kill.”
And X then amplifies and monetises the influencers – and the engagement they generate on the platform – despite “continued breaches” of platform rules.
During the summer riots in England last year, X emerged as a “crucial vector of false information and hate,” CCDH finds.
“Rather than taking steps to mitigate harmful and illegal content, Elon Musk, owner of X, personally amplified conspiracy theories, warning of an impending “civil war” in Britain to his hundreds of millions of followers,” the authors write.
“Hate preachers” who had been banned from Twitter before being reinstated by Musk are still receiving millions of views per day.
Of the six prominent accounts identified by CCDH in the wake of the riots (Tommy Robinson, Paul Golding, Ashlea Simon, Laurence Fox, Andrew Tate, and Calvin Robinson), CCDH found that each remains active on X. All are ‘verified’ Blue Tick users, meaning their posts are actively promoted by the X algorithm. They are highly likely to generate income from X through their posts, through the platform’s Creator Revenue Sharing programme, which channels ad revenue to high-engagement users.
Generating large numbers of replies boosts posts’ engagement, and hate-filled content appears particularly likely now to generate high-engagement.
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Three of the six accounts analysed (Fox, Robinson and Tate) are also allowed to offer paid subscriptions to their content on the platform, enabling them to profit further from their content.
The report finds: “Today, [these influencers’] posts are still routinely followed by streams of replies containing threats, incitements to violence, and open expressions of hatred toward Muslims and migrants. These appear to remain largely unchecked, despite clearly violating X’s own rules which prohibit such harmful content.”
Using an AI model, the researchers identified 4,379 violent replies targeting Muslims or migrants posted in response to 322 posts from the six accounts in the past year. These replies amassed at least 383,102 views in total and “encourage extreme acts of violence, including calls to shoot, to maim, and to kill” CCDH says.
Examples include:
- “We need to shoot them at the point of entry, as they unload from the dinghies.”
- “Dont deport them, let them come in and i will shot them all [sic]”
- “I would like to go postal on the Muslims! They are evil as hell!”
A large number of posts remain live calling for Muslims to be ‘exterminated’ and ‘executed’.
Most replies promoting violence were found under parent posts by Tommy Robinson with 1,838 violent replies, followed by Paul Golding with 1,280 violent replies, Ashlea Simon with 1,103 violent replies, Laurence Fox with 121 violent replies, and (perhaps surprisingly) Andrew Tate with 21 violent replies, according to the report.
