MPs are coming off X due to concerns over hate and disinformation being spread on the platform which has led to rioting on the streets of Britain in the wake of the Southport attacks.
Elon Musk has been locked in a public battle with prime minister Sir Keir Starmer over the past few weeks, tweeting that “civil war is inevitable” in the UK following the tragic deaths of three young girls in the north west.
Last week, he shared a news story purporting to be from the Telegraph newspaper suggesting that the PM is considering building ’emergency detainment camps’ on the Falkland Islands to house rioters involved in recent uprisings.
A cursory Google search for the headline would have quickly proved that it isn’t real, while The Telegraph has since confirmed it did not publish such an article.
According to reports in the Guardian, Labour MPs have begun quitting X in alarm over the platform, with one saying Elon Musk had turned it into “a megaphone for foreign adversaries and far-right fringe groups”.
Newly elected MPs have raised growing concerns about the role X played in the spread of misinformation amid the far-right-led riots in parts of England and Northern Ireland in WhatsApp groups.
Two Labour MPs are known to have told colleagues they were leaving the platform. One of them, Noah Law, has disabled his account. Other MPs who still use X have begun examining alternatives, including Threads, which is owned by Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and the open-source platform Bluesky.
Jess Phillips, a Home Office minister who has more than 700,000 followers on X, has also said she wanted to scale back her use of the platform as it had become a “bit despotic” and was “a place of misery now”.
A government minister also told the Guardian they had reduced their posts on X over the summer and that Musk’s actions had made them “very reluctant to return”.
Related: Tommy Robinson could be stripped of his Irish passport after falsifying information
