Musk briefly shares fake news claiming UK PM Keir Starmer is mulling to send rioters to 'detainment camps'

Tesla CEO Elon Musk stirred a major storm after he shared and then deleted fake news that claimed that the United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer is considering sending far-right rioters to “emergency detainment camps” in the Falklands. The billionaire shared a fake headline, purporting to be from the Telegraph newspaper, on his social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

While Musk deleted the controversial post 30 minutes later, the screenshot of the post circulated online. One of the screenshots also indicated that the post reached almost one million people in a short span of time.

The SpaceX CEO shared the image posted by the co-leader of the far-right group Britain First, Ashlea Simon, which was captioned “We’re all being deported to the Falklands”.

The story behind the fake post

The fake news article was purportedly written by a senior news reporter for the Telegraph and mocked up in the newspaper’s style. The article said that the camps in the Falklands “would be used to detain prisoners from the ongoing riots as the British prison system is already at capacity”.

On Thursday, the Telegraph released a statement in which it maintained that it never published the article in question. “This is a fabricated headline for an article that does not exist. We notified relevant platforms and requested that the post be taken down,” the spokesperson for the British news outlet said in a statement.

In a separate post on X, the newspaper maintained that it was “aware of an image circulating on X which purports to be a Telegraph article about ‘emergency detainment camps’. No such article has ever been published by the Telegraph.” Musk is yet to apologise for sharing the fake news.

However, in the past, the billionaire has constantly shared material criticising the UK government and law enforcement authorities’ responses to the riots that have taken over the country. While sharing a clip from Sky News’ interview with Stephen Parkinson, the director of public prosecutions in England, who said that police officers were scouring social media for material inciting racial hatred, Musk referred to the British official as “The Woke Stasi”.

Musk has been embroiled in a public row with Keir Starmer and British enforcement authorities since he referred to the anti-immigration protests in England and Northern Ireland as “civil war”, which he claimed was inevitable. In response to this, Starmer’s spokesperson maintained that there was “no justification” for those comments.

With inputs from agencies.