Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul, has flung himself into British politics in recent weeks, using his social media platform X to attack and spread misinformation about Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other members of the Labour government. In a series of vitriolic posts to his 211 million followers in recent days, Mr. Musk has falsely accused Mr. Starmer and other Labour Party lawmakers of enabling Britain’s so-called grooming gangs. The phrase refers to a decade-old scandal involving a series of child sex abuse cases in which girls were assaulted and raped by gangs of men in several towns and cities. Mr. Musk’s posts included multiple inaccuracies and treated a widely covered issue as if it had never been mentioned. But the posts nevertheless cast the spotlight back onto a painful child sexual exploitation scandal that troubled Britain and has long provoked heated debate on issues of race, immigration and abuse.

Source: The Times January 07, 2025 15:51 UTC