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On Tuesday 7th January 2025, a fire broke out in the Pacific Palisades, an area just North of Santa Monica in Los Angeles, California. Later day, another fire broke out in Eaton, near the neighbourhood of Pasadena, with other blazes soon following suit. At the time of writing, there are four major fires still burning in Los Angeles: Palisades, Eaton, Hurst, and Auto. As the city struggles to contain the wildfires, the LASD and the California National Guard have been fighting their own battle with looters ravaging the burned properties. A combination of the wildfires and the looting has seen California governor Gavin Newsom heavily criticised, particularly by the incoming president Donald Trump and his wealthiest benefactor Elon Musk, claims that Newsom has said are ‘inexcusable’. Gavin Newsom has accused Elon Musk of ‘encouraging looting’ after Musk reacted to a tweet on his social media platform X that claimed Newsom had ‘decriminalised looting’.
This tweet from Musk is just the latest in a long line of social media posts containing misinformation. He has recently faced criticism in the UK for sharing posts claiming that Gordon Brown’s Labour government had advised British police forces ‘not to intervene’ in incidents of child grooming. On X, Musk has shared tweets referring to an alleged Home Office memo that supposedly contained this advice, but no such memo appears to have ever existed.
Musk’s critiques of Brown’s government have emerged as part of a wider criticism of Starmer’s current Labour government, and their decision not to conduct another national inquiry into grooming gangs in the UK. Musk has claimed that Starmer is ‘complicit’ in ‘covering up’ the grooming scandal in Rochdale, Rotherham, and Oldham. During the 2014 inquiry into the Rotherham scandal, Professor Alexis Jay who conducted the review found that there had been ‘blatant collective failures’ by the local authorities, while a 2022 inquiry, also conducted by Jay, found that the sexual abuse of children was ‘endemic’ in both England and Wales, but there is no evidence that politicians, councils, or police forces attempted a cover up.
Musk’s desire to critique elected officials is respectable given that being able to hold politicians accountable is a hallmark of Western democracy, however his methods serve only to add more fuel to the fire. His persistent use of misinformation means that no legitimate critique of politicians occurs, and instead dangerous and criminal behaviour is encouraged. His outrageously misinformed comments about British safeguarding minster Jess Phillips have resulted in her receiving threats and having to up her protection.
Musk’s choice to continuously foster an environment in which dangerous and false rhetoric can be shared with no checks on authenticity has resulted in the decision by British MPs to summon him for testimony on the role of X in the UK riots that took place in the summer of 2024. For Musk to continue to spread misinformation on his social media platforms is not only disrespectful but dangerous, and it undoubtedly paves the way for future violence. While there is no denying that free speech needs to be protected, Musk’s choices directly threaten the freedoms of others and thus have no place in our democracy.
Image: ‘Elon Musk on Twitter‘, Alpha Photo, 2023 // CC BY-NC 2.0
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