More than half of the accounts that posted on Elon Musk's X about the rioting in Belfast and the civil disorder in Southampton in June were based outside the UK. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.
According to an analysis by the Guardian, of the 8,672 accounts whose combined posts about the events exceeded 1,000 views, just 45.3% were shown as from the UK. Of these, 16.8% came from the US, 4.5% from Ireland, and about a quarter from all European countries other than the UK.
Seven of the 12 most-read tweets about Belfast and Southampton came from the US – including one from Musk himself and two other US "alt-right" commentators – while an eighth was linked to North America.
The analysis underlines that US rightwing actors are seeking to influence the UK and boost their position on X in moments of disorder. The Guardian collected 43,000 tweets mentioning Belfast, Southampton, Henry Nowak or Vickrum Digwa posted on X during the period of the unrest in both cities. This covered the period from 2 June to the end of 3 June for Southampton and from the evening of 8 June to the end of 9 June for Belfast.
Using a large language model (LLM), the team first classified which posts were directly related to the protests in Belfast and Southampton, and then categorised them as containing explicit or implicit racist language or anti-immigration comments. For those about Belfast, they also classified tweets as containing calls inciting to violence. A team of three people manually verified more than 5,500 posts, statistically testing the accuracy of the model to be robust and in line with academic standards.
Nearly a third of all 43,000 posts on X relating to the two incidents contained racist or anti-immigration comments. Almost one in 10 relating to Belfast contained calls for violence or paramilitary or vigilante action.
Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, said the data demonstrated that X had become "a weapon of choice" for hostile foreign actors seeking to manipulate shocking and divisive content. Their goal, he added, was "to amplify local tragedies and crises, intensify racist narratives, and incite violence in communities they have never set foot in and to whom they have no real connection."
A post from Musk after the life sentencing of the killer of 18-year-old Henry Nowak, who had been falsely accused of racism by police after being stabbed in Southampton, has been viewed more than 28m times. "Legacy mainstream media, same ones who wrote about George Floyd millions of times, are dead silent about Nowak," Musk posted shortly before 3pm on 2 June, in effect promoting his own platform at a time of heightened tension and disorder in the Hampshire port.
Eleven police officers were injured on the night of 2 June in Southampton as people claiming to protest over Nowak's murder marched to the site of his death. This followed a rally, addressed by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, outside the city's main police station.
Musk is based in the US and has not visited the UK since November 2023. A Guardian analysis last month found he posted about race and immigration in the UK twice as often as he did about SpaceX in the run-up to the aerospace company's initial public offering in June.
Security experts including Fiona Hill, a former adviser to the US and UK governments, have warned that the UK is a soft target for online manipulation by overseas actors because it does not take the idea of civil, or "psychological", defence seriously.
Dr Julia Ebner, a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the University of Oxford, said flashpoint episodes such as in Southampton and Belfast had become "strategic events" for far-right actors seeking to amplify and exploit them. "They are using the UK as a negative example, smearing the UK to promote their own narratives of western civilisational decay or social collapse," Ebner said. "But the other purpose is to influence UK politics, and European politics more widely," using crisis moments to "promote a strong, strengthened far-right wave across the world."
Four of the top 12 most-seen tweets came from UK accounts: two were by the leader of the Restore Britain party, Rupert Lowe, whom Musk has endorsed; another was from GB News, while the most popular, with 37.6m views, was written by the "anti-woke" rightwing political commentator Konstantin Kisin.
Other accounts located in the US were anonymous, though familiar. @EndWokeness posted a blurry still image of a black man attacking a white man in Belfast on 8 June, saying the full video was "too graphic" to post. It attracted 16.3m views. The assault, a stabbing in which the victim, Stephen Ogilvie, lost an eye, prompted three nights of racially motivated rioting targeting non-white people in the city.