Musk promotes far-right yet again…
Tech billionaire and avid Trump supporter Elon Musk is once more being condemned for promoting the far-right, this time for promoting a documentary by Tommy Robinson.
Musk has faced much criticism for allowing X, formerly Twitter, to become a social media platform on which fake news and extremist content can be shared without consequence, and also previously shared fake news on the site himself.
In the latest incident, he quoted an account praising a documentary by Tommy Robinson, the founder and former leader of far-right English Defence League.
Shaun Maguire, the account in question, shared Robinson’s documentary and posted on X: “I couldn’t sleep last night so I watched this entire documentary
“Anyone who doubts the institutional decay and socialist moral rot taking hold of Western societies needs to watch this. Tommy is in jail for showing this documentary. The least you can do is watch it.”
Musk quoted the post and wrote in reply: “Yes”.
Journalist and commentator Mehdi Hasan, wrote in response to Musk: “Difficult to describe what a dangerous moment we are in.
“The owner of this site/richest man in the world/closest adviser to the next president is promoting a Tommy Robinson (!) documentary to his 200 million followers.
“This is the mainstreaming of violent, Islamophobic fascism”.
Robinson was jailed recently for 18 months for contempt of court for repeating false allegations against a Syrian refugee, in breach of an injunction.
He was told that “nobody is above the law” by a judge who said the “flagrant” breaches had been done in a “sophisticated” way to ensure the false claims would achieve “maximum coverage”, reaching tens of millions of people.
The Guardian reported at the time that the “court hearing was told that Robinson had in effect repeated all of the allegations that led to him losing a libel case brought by Jamal Hijazi, who had been filmed being attacked at a school in West Yorkshire.
“Shortly after the video of the incident went viral, Robinson falsely claimed in Facebook videos that Hijazi was “not innocent and he violently attacks young English girls in his school”.
The false claims were repeated by Robinson in a number of interviews as well as in a documentary film made by Robinson.
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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